


In illo tempore

by Anusaya



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:38:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 15
Words: 39,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anusaya/pseuds/Anusaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>mukuro backstory biofic, pre-canon timeline. mukuro / practically everyone. kokuyorgy. [COMPLETE.] \o\</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ex nihilo

**Author's Note:**

> (first lines are inspired by a KHR exchange prompt about Mukuro, supreme beings, and acting as the moral superior to any such -- though to claim this is exactly a prompt fill might be pushing it, as I only used the idea loosely --!)

**AND SO YOU GIVE IN;**

 

Six years old, Mukuro declares, incontrovertibly:

_The world spins upon an axis of pain, and if there is a God, let us each be his moral superior._

It is, thereafter, the belief by which he lives.

 


	2. hey pretty

>   
> **PROLOGUE: o2xo**   
> 

Let us begin with a suitably dramatic birth.

The Estraneo raised Mukuro to follow Catholic doctrines, and though he may eschew the God of their books, the imagery -- you have to admit -- is quite compelling: the Pietà, itself in Italy, a somber mother cradling her murdered child, skin and eyes and bodies set in stone, rendered with a lavish attention to detail, an artist enamoured of suffering, lovingly dwelling upon it.

The truth is, even Rokudo Mukuro must have been, once, the lamb in question. Once. A long time ago, now.

Picture, if you will, a woman with black ringlets, holding her soon-to-be-slaughtered child not so unlike the venerable statue, but rather than a grown man, this is instead the babe from the manger. (Except, Mukuro allows, there never was nor ever will be a manger. His own dramatic creation myth shall not feature his inclusion sleeping amongst pigs and horses, should he have a say in the matter.)  


She visits the church, this woman, each Sunday, and sits in the pews. Her fingers cross at the chest, mouth curving in prayer --

Wait. Wait. Here Mukuro loses his narrative again.

She visits the church, this woman, each Sunday, and sits in the pews. She prays there, confesses to the priest, buries her face in her pillow at night and speaks to God in the darkness. Rood above her breasts, gloved hand lighting a shaking cigarette once she's outside, brown Dior heel thumping meaninglessly against the cobblestone. _Good day, Father._

And then she kisses her little boy's cheek as he cheerfully departs to the bus stop.

Only, instead of being wheeled to class, he's wheeled to a laboratory and promptly dissected.

No, no, this won't do at all, will it? This is hardly proper story-telling.

The omission, you see, is the A to Z of it: she visits the church, his mother, and she prays. Mukuro has decided to cleave to these details; he rather likes them, and he has known his share of devoted Italian citizenry, so why not? All is well and good.

But then she sends her little boy to a laboratory.

Now, herein lies the problem. You don't simply traipse from church to sell your boy to a laboratory. This isn't good story-telling in the least. Try again. Remember, there must be a build up, and perhaps foreshadowing.

Her rationale is a tragic one. It must be tragic, because Mukuro has decided he likes imagining a trembling curve to her mouth, and large, soulful, watering eyes. (Later, he will meet Chrome, and not consider the Freudian implications in this imagery. He is simply being artistic. And Chrome looks nothing like his mother that he has made up, in any event.) Her tragic story is that she is having an affair. Yes, an affair explains it quite tidily. It's why she's so devout and why she sits in the pews.

 ~~Rokudo Mukuro's mother was having an affair with Satan.~~

 _Please._ That's too melodramatic even for his tastes.

There's a small, shameful part of him (perhaps the part which has been to hell) which says: _Yes, undoubtedly so._ This shameful impulse is the same which in every man's boyhood suggests to him that he is an alien or perhaps the reincarnation of Elvis. Although Mukuro finds that rather silly. He's the reincarnation of many famous individuals, certainly, but no one from recent centuries.

People simply fail to understand how reincarnation works these days, honestly.

But returning to our narrative:

Not Satan, then, but a Japanese businessman.

A man of the yakuza. Maybe.

Ah, here we arrive at a decent explanation.

A baby born with Eurasian features. Eyes, nose, cheekbones; the epicanthic fold is not present, no, but there's a definite _something_ to the shape -- a sort of delicateness which rings in contrast to the large Italian bones, the swarthiness of the husband. The child's hair is too straight, too silky, and a midnight blue rather than Tuscan charcoal.

The _eyes_ , though: these alone, Mukuro takes from her.

Blue. _Cerulean._ Reflecting light like the stained glass windows far above his baptism; the sun dips down into his iris, dragging a piece of the sky with it, and they drown, sinking like creases of water shadows in a public pool. Ribbons of light. Shallow water. Refraction and reflection. Arresting images.

The husband at first glance spies the bastardy in the child.

He cannot permit it. He is, we suppose, a man of the mafia, albeit one of the lowest ranks. A hairy-knuckled, newspaper-squeezing, wife-beater clad (in suits only when amongst the Famiglia) composition of an inferiority complex, and -- he is clenching his meaty fist and thinking that, were he a bigger man, his wife would have never done such a thing. Were he a bigger man, in point of fact, he would cap her. And the lover, too. Fridge them both. Dump the bodies in the river. And, oh, he wants to. He wants to, you see. He's imagining squeezing her throat like he squeezes the newspaper. As an avid consumer of third-rate pornography at greased, sleazy cartel dumping grounds, the husband knows his wife slots easily into one of those roles.

He looks at the infant and imagines the affair, imagines her tits bared, the rood between them caressed by the interloper's mouth.

He would kill her, but he's a coward.

It's sex that makes the child, and while the husband may remain unable to destroy the wife, he cannot abide the bastard.

Thus the wife takes her little lamb to a laboratory.

And so we begin again again again ---

~*~

Or maybe not.

Mukuro considers his history with the spirit of the idle connoisseur of tragedy and theatre, and what with our new-fangled postmodern narrative, it should come as no surprise that our concept of _unreliable narrator_ lends a hand in his depiction of, at moments, a blonde of faded Monroe beauty rather than the raven-tressed original item.

For whoever the woman was, she had conceived with a male of the species. And she had not aborted -- had, rather, expelled him from her body at an approximation of the proper date by which a child might survive in the open air. Had pushed him into this world with (he imagines, in the rare occasions he thinks of his origin at all) all the futile strength of her own body, womb and muscles in that uniquely traumatic synchronicity of birth. Perhaps a bloody bed, perhaps a sterilized hospital (beside, of course, a church of Saint Somebody), perhaps a bath tub amid rose-scented water.

Perhaps (it would be fitting) his had been a particularly violent birth, a breach or a Cesarian section, and perhaps his mother had, even as she held him, resented her little bringer of hurt.

His own mother, then, may have been one of the boldly honest ones.

She traded him to her Estraneo comrades (or was, alternatively, Estraneo herself) in exchange for freedom, for physical and financial well-being, for the approval of her mate, or for a new mate altogether.

Excess baggage, you see.

And perhaps, even still, she had been dishonest enough to cry.


	3. with up so floating many bells down

>   
> 
> 
> **.oxo. 3: when i was a child and you were a child, in our kingdom by the sea**  
> 

This is the truth.

And this is the only truth:

A silver glow.

A bright, bright patch of light, and dark corners, and a silver glow, and this is the truth and this is the only truth.

His eyes hurt where the sharp sticks went in, which came after the day the children sat in a circle, elbow to elbow, with hands full of toy cars, and with hands full of the dolls that he, ~~_____ ____~~ , set one atop another.

The dolls, that is.

He stripped off the pink clothes of the woman doll and put the man doll on top of her on the counter and looked at one of the girls and then the two of them flushed and fidgeted and squirmed at the shameful wrongness of their play-acted images: _So naughty, and what if Mommy sees?_ But they're making marriage plans, in the way boys and girls do -- the thoughtless way of five year olds who assume weddings will simply materialize, fully formed, always believing they are the only suitable end goals. And this they've learned from what they've seen, and maybe from the movies.

They do get to watch movies.

And he ( who is then called ~~_____ ____~~ ) likes movies!

Sticky-fingered, fumbling at an old VHS, fairies and sylphs and mermaids; he's watched them so many times that the plastic on one side becomes cracked, and then the tape gets jammed in the VCR, too.

There's not a lot else to _do_ except play with the toys and watch the movies and go onto the doctor's table between times, and listen to the other children cry.

So here he stands, barefoot in shorts, T-shirt stained with marker ink, snot trail recently rubbed on the wall, glistening also on one pale cheek.

And here's the big screen TV projector on its weird metal contraption.

Here's the VCR. Here's him poking at the slot for the tape.

It's jammed.

It needs to come out. He wants to watch something else, and the tape is jammed and it needs to come out, so he's prodding with a pinky, and then two fingers, and then leaning forward and squinting with one eye. Squinting into the slot. Strange shapes, metal bits, thin and fine, and some little boy is screaming-crying in the background, or maybe it's a girl, and he thinks his turn will come around soon, but for now, there's the matter of picking out this tape. A butter knife might do it. Maybe a scalpel, and his teeth hurt and his arm twitches a little at the thought: remembering. Scalpels hurt. They tell him it won't hurt, that it will be all right, but it does hurt once the stuff in the shots wears off, and sometimes that's fast, too.

He could get this tape out, he thinks, with a butter knife or a pin or a scalpel or even with that three-pointed metal star from which the silver glow emanates.

It's the only star here.

There is no night. There is no day. The hand on the wall clock turns a full three hundred and sixty degrees, again and again, and whenever he looks over, the hands have moved. But time is a lie. Night and day are lies. Changes are illusions. Or sameness is the illusion, because here it is always the same, but isn't that a lie, really?

The children leave, one by one and two by two.

The boy last sees his future bride-to-be with one eye replaced by a wet red hole, lid pinned back.

 _Insertion failed,_ someone says.

Her skin is ashen, the opposite eye closed, and then they tuck her beneath a sheet. The boy catches this in a glance. Nothing more.

He thinks: _I pulled off her doll's head, and maybe that's why._

It works that way in the movies, doesn't it? You fill someone's doll with pins, and they hurt and die. People. Dolls. People. Dolls. _We're a box of toys._

The weather is always the same and the light is always the same, bright in the middle with shadow-licked corners, and the temperature is always the same; metallic, chilled, grey somehow, like the walls, like the light which shines on them, adding a tint of silver. But the pain, now -- the pain comes and goes, and the pain tells the passing of time.

Bleeding, bled, scabbed, scarred.

These are the days of the week.

Or a blackberry-hued bruise which rolls to navy blue with grey splotches, then sickly green, then faded yellow.

Now, listen to someone else's pain:

Screaming, crying, sobbing, silence.

These are the minutes of the hour.

They say: _He handles it best. Yessir, he doesn't cry, that boy._

He doesn't cry, no. It doesn't occur to him to cry.

There must have been, once, a time when his cheeks were soaked with water and with salt.

The earliest memories of fleshy childhood consist of a faint sense of moisture, like the press of a hot wet towel from an ancient infancy. (Even in this, the boy cannot say whether it is a true experience or a thing he has felt only within his dreams.)

And then? Nothing. Or everything.

The boy closes his two blue eyes and listens and sees.

 _Come to me in this place,_ he thinks to no one, to everyone, to a lost mother.

The sky is the colour of slate, broken by fissures of white light. Cloud-swabbed. Cotton balls. It's like the ocean on a stormy day, roiling, only the tossed waves are up above, and the grass below is thin and sparse and sort of brown and no one else is present. No one but him. The emptiness is enough to make all the world an echo. It's always been like this, since a time before memory.

But here is the reason the boy does not cry: when the pain begins, he goes to this place with the grey sky and the sparse grass.

He crouches in the big empty open place under that sky and then one day --


	4. the most familiar room // every implement was leading to you

I was a dreamer  
Staring at windows  
Out onto the main street  
Cos that's where the dream goes  
And each time they found fresh meat to chew  
I would turn away and return to you  
You would offer me your unmade made  
Feed me till I'm fed, read me till I'm read  
But when the morning came  
You would catch me at the window again  
In an eyes wide open sleeping state  
Staring into space, with no look upon my face

\-- Villagers, "Becoming a Jackal"

>   
> 
> 
> **.oxo. 4**  
> 

There is a song for this.

A symphony from the movies, maybe, or a jingle -- commercial, because even here, there have been commercials on the television set. Not anymore, though. No, not now. The TV screen is a fine rain of transparent shards, and the boy dodges with the small, feral, sneaking motions of a child, but moreover, a child who is accustomed to raised hands and raised voices.

You know how they move, children like that. Only --

The difference is that such children tend to have downcast eyes and sulking, sallow faces. They certainly don't look you in the eye, and smiles are alien expressions upon their persons. They look, in fact, rather more akin to the other two boys, whom he hears before he sees, shuffling around heedless of pain and heavy of foot, crunching plastic, sweeping glass aside with the points of their toes.

At present, the hall floor is a ruin of metal tangles, jagged slices of glass, broken pipes belching a pale swamp of mist.

Contrary to the limping, halting, hangdog manner of those boys, this one is smiling: thin, ethereal, will-o'-the-wisp eye reflecting off the silver three-pointed star (which he now holds in his hands).

He reaches up and peels the bloody bandage aside, uncovering a new star, a new colour. "It's just as I thought," he says, and then, those first lines: "this world isn't worth much, is it? Let's erase it all. Shall we go together?"

The room is strewn with broken things. Broken dolls, broken bodies, broken machinery; gore on the front of his shirt, the walls, the ceiling, and, wouldn't you know it? He had never even managed to remove the tape from the VCR before he shattered the entire system. Well, never mind. It's no matter, because you see, the boy has learned something important, namely -- and here, he touches the eye -- he can create his own world. Fill it with talking lions, mermaids in the sea, and pineapple fairies inhabiting the bodies of fruits beneath purple tropical skies, and pineapple fairies who are also mermaids, and ice cream and chocolate, and all that's pretty and tasty and good in this world.

INSERTION SUCCESSFUL, written on the last sheet of paper produced in the laboratory, typed in 12-point font, all caps, cleanly printed, but torn by a scientist's careless hand.

The boy (this being the one around whom the bodies lie) steps to the table and gingerly removes the sheafs of paper.

He reads them, all the while dimly realizing that he _can_ read this print and, moreover, knowing all the while that he should not be able to, for down in this timeless place, there is no mother and no father and no one to teach him how to read or even how to make sense of the movies he has seen, and yet the visuals make a kind of sense, and right now, his head is full of knowledge he has never learned -- lifetimes he has never lived.

These came with the insertion (successful!) of the six-cut stitched eye, and while there is a dim awareness of their newness inside of him, there is no sense that they don't belong, nor even any sense that they have not always been present. The boy's body accepts information as it accepts (and has accepted) the transplant.

"They called me a corpse," he tells the other two, who are still looking on. "I must have died on that table -- " Pointing idly. "I see. It's as I expected, if they set you on fire."

The boy whom the speaker thus far knows as The Boy Who Was Set On Fire deigns to nod, but otherwise does not respond.

"And I was sorry to see that," says the boy holding the weapon.

"Yeah," says The Boy Who Was Set On Fire And Has Bandages. And, after a moment, adds, "-- It didn't feel good."

"Hm," says the boy who is amid the bodies, reading the sheets, already distracted again.

So, he died.

He doesn't remember dying on the table.

He doesn't remember -- who he is, actually. Come to think of it.

Throbbing behind the red eye (reflected on the silver three-pointed star: yes, it's certainly _red_ ) there are memories of other bodies, other murders, books and seeping colours and names, oh so many names, but there's no definitive Mother, _Madre_ , _Maman_ , and no definitive Father, _Padre, Papan._

There's only this place without a sky, and memories in his head.

Two blue eyes, but they aren't blue now, are they? No, one isn't. He sees it. Touches it again.

Where did it come from? Oh, from the table. From hands and needles. It came out from behind the bandage he has torn aside. It came with knives and it came with fingers and it came with that cool drip of anaesthesia. He had seen a canopy of stars above the world with the sparse grass, although the boy cannot in point of fact remember actually ever seeing stars or ever seeing grass. Yet he knows them like he knows language, in that thoughtless, effortless kind of knowing: _Grass_ , _sky_. Grass. Sky, and --

He looks around.

Murder.

"I did this," he says (it is not a question, not in the slightest), gesturing at the bodies.

"Yeah. How?" says the boy with the scarred face, who then scratches at the back of his head -- with his foot.

A light shrug. "I thought about toys -- "

He thought about his dolls.

The broken dolls, like the girl's broken body, or the boy's broken body. He thought about how in the stories (in the movies), you moved a doll, and it moved a body. Puppetry, or magic. He was having this thought after the needle went in, after he espied the fluid drip from the corner of the functioning eye, after the second eye was sealed, and while the curtains opened and closed again to reveal that canopy of stars.

Walking under the starlight, the boy thought of dolls, and an instant later, it had seemed to him that he was back in the room, only not in his own body. No, rather, he was looking down at a boy in the middle of a surgery, a boy whose new eye was being carefully, delicately carved by the fine point of a laser emitted from an instrument of no greater width than a ballpoint pin. _Like carving a diamond,_ someone said, and there was laughter.

 _An out of body experience,_ the boy had decided, again knowing (in a sort of back-of-the-mind half-conscious way) that there should be no manner by which he knows to what _out of body experience_ refers. Maybe this was the part where he died? Oh, yes, he remembers now! He did die! Or, at least, they thought he died.

Come to think of it, he remembers looking down on the boy as the other adults in the circle jolted into a sort of feverish panic: _Goddamn it, Victor. #69's heart is failing, looks like! Quick, get the emergency assistance!_

Who was Victor? The name hadn't even sounded Italian.

At any rate, as the doctors scrambled with defibrillators, the boy -- or rather his consciousness, looking down at a lab coat and large adult hands -- meandered off, unnoticed, and took hold of the three-pointed star.

The rest, as they say, is history.

A dream-like slaughter. Not at all as the movies portray, is it? Messier, for one. Much more so.

And now the room is misty and quiet and the -- -- the trident, his mind finally supplies (a merman's, or the weapon of Bologna's statue) --

\-- is back in the rightful hands, a small child's hands, not the large clumsy ones he had had before, and all bodies are crumpled on the floor, their blood painting the walls in pretty red.

"I thought about my toys," the boy says again, "and then I made _them_ my toys."

It seemed so easy, when you put it like that.

"But what's your name, anyway?" -- That's the boy with the scarred face -- the more talkative of the two others, it seems.

"#69," he answers.

"That's -- that's not a name!" proclaims the vocal one. Then, as if remembering who he's addressing (a child who has lately completed a massacre, not for nothing): "Is it?"

"Hm. No, I suppose not." The bloody boy continues to leaf through the documents, searching in vain. It should be here, shouldn't it? But it isn't. Not a proper name, at any rate. Only numbers. Fragments of Italian. Kanji. "Mukuro, right? It talks about me like that, here -- "

"Mister Corpse -- ?" And there's a startled look, like the loud boy wants to protest this name, too, but instead he shuffles a little closer, looking at all the bodies, as if allowing the deep irony of the chosen name and its accompanying context to sink into him. (So Mukuro thought at the time; later, he will realize that Ken had precisely no idea what the word _irony_ meant.)

Then, he sniffs at one of the _original_ corpses, and, without any preamble whatsoever, clamps his teeth -- considerably formidable incisors included -- upon the cheek, tearing out a flap of skin and growling as he bites into the soft flesh, chewing contentedly.

The quieter boy scowls.

"That isn't even sanitary," he mutters.

"Shltop mahkihn up waahds!" (the exclamation thus obfuscated by a mouthful of dead scientist cheek, followed by another utterance concerning four eyes and stupid hair and stupid hats)

"Rokudo Mukuro," Mukuro says, paying no particular mind to the not-especially-euphonic crunching of fibrous bones in the background.

He doesn't really know why he picks that name. It _does_ sound somewhat pleasing to the ears, albeit not pleasing through the liquid syllables of _lullaby_ or the ghostly sibilance of _whisper_. Rokudo Mukuro -- no, it isn't a musical name, not precisely, but it's appealing in that harsher, quasi-daemonic style, like Azazel, with vowels nestled comfortably amid alveolar trills and velar plosives, flanking them playfully.

 _Mukuro_ , for corpse, himself and his handiwork, and _rokudo_ \-- well, there's the eye, you see, and its accompanying implications, of which he's already begun to grasp, and _rokudo_ had been written in the papers, too, albeit not together with corpse, but then, this is merely an argument for creativity, is it not?

The eye is his, now. Sewn into him. And marked: he can never forget that. Cut ever-so-precisely with that ballpoint pin of a laser.

There is a song for this, somewhere.

Prior to departing from the laboratory, Mukuro (almost as an after-thought, really) retrieves the gun within which he knows their most special creation rests -- awaiting him.

He's earned it, hasn't he?

Maybe there is a song for this, after all.

_Happiness is a warm gun._

\-- even if it will still be some years. Some time. Patience is, of course, a virtue.


	5. my tree drinks melted snow // just eight feet tall, a pale and fragile thing

**  
**

> **.oxo. 5**

 **  
**

It is evening when they reach the surface.

Over their heads hangs a blue-purple sky spotted with stars, and the dying rays of the summer's sun slant long and burning orange-tangerine over the waters, above the hills and the trees, and this is Mukuro's first true glimpse of Italy, where once he was born and where once he has died.

Behind his lips, his teeth are a grinding smile.

"Let us find a place to go," he says.

They are small, and when word eventually breaks of the massacre in the laboratory (which on record, perhaps, does not exist) sequestered within the industrial district of Bologna, none shall be seeking after a triumvirate of six-year-olds as either the culprits or the survivors. That's just as well for them.

Still, the blood stains across their clothing and the tell-tale tattered bandages would raise certain adult eyebrows, regardless -- were they allowed to remain in plain sight, that is.

Mukuro shares his secret; a finger pressed to his lips, _shhhh_ , and then all three boys are garbed in knee breeches, black stockings, and tweed jackets.

"Boys on the streets dress like this," he explains, because the other two look rather puzzled.

"Still?" asks the quieter one -- that's Chikusa, presently. His expression is somewhat dubious. And after Mukuro was so kind as to give him that fashionable newsboy cap (which Chikusa now adjusts, glancing upwards as one does when puffing one's bangs, albeit dead-eyed)! "It seems -- "

"Only girls wear this stuff," Ken grumbles (more to the point, as usual), picking at the hose and ripping it, to which Mukuro inwardly scowls a little, though his outward smile remains unwavering.

"Maybe another lifetime, then." He shrugs. He's already accepted that he is older than the other two -- many cycles of reincarnation older, in fact; once the eye entered his body, memories and knowledge and a panorama of ideas began to scaffold upon themselves, splitting his mind like sunlight before a prism. Granted -- such information and such power is, nevertheless, filtered through the vessel of a six-year-old, and thus: "But it looks very nice. Like boys' school uniforms. And I'll take that hat, if you don't want it!"

In this, he is entirely serious.

It is a very nice newsboy cap, you see.

(Yes, one might argue Mukuro could simply make another for himself, but if there were two hats, the hat would fail to be unique and therefore worthwhile, and besides, even at that age, he thought far too highly of himself than to simply steal another's gimmick. Chikusa, alas, had already become Hat Boy, and would remain so thenceforth.)

"School is stupid," Ken says, but, at whatever he sees reflected in Mukuro's eyes (not disappointment, certainly), he adds, more brightly, "But if Mukuro-san says so!"

Chikusa grunts agreement or something like it.

Mukuro beams -- grateful, of course, that they realize how right he is.

When that happens, matters are always made simpler.

Bologna is cobblestone streets, stone archways, red buildings and red roofs, Greco-Roman architecture of ages gone by, a Poisedon statue in the square (presiding over the attendant scenery with quite the _familiar_ weapon), pointed building tops, churches and universities as old as time -- and industry, too.

Always the industry, the work and the factories and the tourism of Americans and others from across borders and from across every point of ocean and mountain, come to see this place which looks as though it has been doused by the rust and the blood of centuries, of all those who have gone before. Graven memories.

Red roofs beneath an over-bright red sun, the red of a wounded day's last breaths.

And the sun above is an eye.

The sun above is _the_ eye, Mukuro thinks in one brief mad moment, then dismisses the thought.

Said eye is throbbing in the awareness of a whole new world laid out, picturesque. The laboratory is only a dimming memory of sharp corners and white lights and brightness and shadows, but this world holds colours -- all soft tints and shades and burnt ones, too -- and textures, gritty and rough and worn buildings, and cool breezes uplifting the back of his hair (unique crest and all).

But if his time down in the basement laboratory has given Mukuro some newfound awareness of illusions, then this waiting world offers no exception to that lesson.

A more crude illusionist than himself has crafted this one, yet Mukuro's own senses alert him to the lie, the myth, the fakery.

Not the buildings, no, not the rocks. They hardly matter. In not mattering, the only illusion they afford is that of a thing perceived but scarcely present, neither tangible nor significant.

The true fabrication at work here is the notion of peace. Quiet. Society.

No, it's not explicitly stated by the rocks and by the sky, but the promise lingers. This is a city, and this is a place where people live, and people live in cities to make functional civilization.

Work, breaking bread, families.

Children in the basement in a laboratory beneath the roads.

Mukuro is too young, still, to articulate it precisely like so, but the instinctual feeling of distrust runs thicker than canal water, thicker than the blood he'll re-paint this red city with, and _that_ thought brings a more sincere smile to touch his lips.

Three boys sneak down the streets in the deepening dark.

Adults look at them and smile approvingly, their eyes saying: _boys will be boys_. Chikusa fails to make eye contact and shuffles away -- sullen, always, as Mukuro is learning, and Ken growls low in his throat, almost inaudibly, but Mukuro meets their gazes with his own and smiles back. _  
_

Ghost adults, ghost tourists, ghost factory workers. There they come down the streets -- ghost lovers arm in arm with one another, demon priests, old gargoyles emerging from their gargoyle-styled churches. Dragons in fine clothing, breaths and tongues full of submerged fire.

"Isn't that something?" Mukuro laughs. "Look at all the funny ghosts."

 _I'm not afraid of these ghosts,_ he thinks.

The other boys regard him strangely, and the ghosts, when they deign to turn, are always smiling, heedless of the blood that goes unseen. It's like a wonderful joke.

And Mukuro is unafraid, but --

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, there strides an older dragon ghost woman.

Forward she comes like a voluminous storm cloud, clad as she is in a polka-dotted pink and lavender oversized muu muu dress, pink beret, lumbering astride a tiny black and brown terrier creature (Mukuro slants a glance at Ken, notices his mouth watering, and shakes his head furiously -- no, don't even think about it). "Look -- " she begins, in a shriek, " -- at your adorable bedhead! Why, my great-nephew Naito would love to meet -- where is your _maman_?"

Kill her, Mukuro thinks. Kill the dragon ghost.

" _Maman_ is waiting for us to come home for supper," Mukuro says, cocking his head a little to give his smile a tilt. "It's really very late, and ah, we can't stay!"

Then: A Very Very Sad Look, as per punctuation.

"How dutiful," the woman says, approvingly, though her rat-creature growls at the boys. "But, mercy, what is the matter with your eye?"

So then they run.

As it turns out, laboratory-enhanced physical abilities can allow one to get very, very far in a very, very short amount of time.

By the time they pause, Ken is on all fours and panting, and Mukuro's eye is burning with some exertion he does not quite think he understands.

"A close call," he says, and, "I think she was a witch."

It is deep into the night by the time they have left the city proper and are, rather, traversing down the grassy banks of the Po Valley, winding back to nature and away from the teeming land of roofs.

Soon enough, Mukuro entirely forgets about illusory clothing, and thenceforth, it only occurs to him to make use of his powers in such a way during times of great need and duress. In point of fact, the nearer his six-year-old body approaches to trees and bodies of water, the more it inclines -- in that curious manner common to so many boys -- towards forgetting clothing altogether. Stockings, jacket, shirt (blood-stained or otherwise) --

\-- and trousers.

Once Mukuro has decided at long last to seek rest amid and beneath a copse of poplars, he is down to tight white little boy underwear, and should he chance a visit to the river, that too will vanish for a time.

The gun, a small and tidy pistol, rests in the bundle of discarded clothing, carefully wrapped, and the trident has temporarily vacated reality. The other boys, of course, are curious about it -- what strange metals must have been smelted into that weapon, for it to be able to appear and disappear entirely at its new master's whims? And honestly, he can't precisely explain that himself. Later, he will think he is both reality and unreality, and the trident is simply a connecting point; a channel -- a border between Mukuro's worlds and this human vale. The trident is his bone, his spine, but tonight, there is no trident, and tonight, he rests his head on the bare earth, and says, "Let's take turns. Two can sleep, and one can keep watch."

He expects protests from the other boys, especially the loud one.

To his surprise, though, neither objects to the idea of sentry duty.

Maybe it's their shared paranoia, an understanding rooted in the hatred and fear they each wear like brands. Or maybe they are, in their own way, restless, and not so eager for sleep as one might presume.

On that night, Mukuro learns one reason why this could be.

It is Ken who volunteers the first night's watch.

As Mukuro looks on, interested, he fumbles with a strange set of teeth. "Opossum channel," he says, by way of explanation, grinning proudly. "Hey, Mister Mukuro, I got this."

Mukuro yawns, unaware of whether he's still smiling. So Ken will be nocturnal, then?

This is the last issue he has time to ponder before he is fast asleep.

When he wakes from his nightmares, Mukuro knows, absolutely, why the other boys evinced no eagerness to follow.

It's twilight, with pale glow rising from the earth, and darkness, still, and Mukuro rubs idly at the last lingering stitch marks over the eye. Soon, they will disappear entirely.

His body is all wire and sinew, the faint discoloured hue of surgical scars on the front and the back, and so far as that is concerned --

Mukuro blinks, tiredly, and reaches down, feeling beneath himself, surprised at the sensation of something soft. An instant thereafter, he jolts awake and rolls over, onto his knees, peering with trained caution and wariness.

Poplar leaves, pampas grass heads (from someone's lawn, could it be?), fluff which appears as though it might have been forcibly torn from mattress stuffing (has someone been up by the roads again -- ?), chunks of animal fur . . .

"Meh, all I could do in one night," Ken grumbles.

Mukuro pats the would-be bed. "A nest. I see."

"And I s'pose that stupid Kakipi can sleep in it, too."

"Perhaps so." Mukuro stretches. "But now, I'll watch. Come here. Lie down."

It must have taken a lot of energy, after all, to have built this, mustn't it have?

Much better, indeed, than a hospital bed. And with enough nights, maybe even the nightmares will cease. But at this exact moment, he's not concerning himself with that.

Mukuro reverses their positions and walks out into the twilight, into the morning of the haunted world.


	6. (the end of the) summer breeze

> .oxo. 6

Three months later, and maybe it's a wonder they have not yet died from exposure.

Then again, if anything is true of the three boys, it's that -- for all Mukuro might claim to have died a thousand times -- they do not perish easily. As he himself noticed when Chikusa emerged from the fire, they are in fact nigh-indestructible. Of course, this too is another opinion common among boys of such an age. Thus it comes as no surprise when, in the late summer dwindling to early fall, during a time in which food is growing more scarce, the three of them make their way down to the river for frequent fishing expeditions.

At first, Ken does all the fishing with his bear channel, but the other two grow restless, and with autumn taking hold and the summer fruits vanishing all too rapidly, it seems sensible for everyone to attempt to gather more food. So it is that Mukuro finds himself at the river's edge, trident in hand.

Ken is already in the water, shape accordingly altered.

"This will be easy," Mukuro says. "Hit their heads with the rocks, and then I'll scoop them out."

Chikusa pushes his glasses up and says, "Yes, Mukuro-sama."

This Will Be Easy. On paper, it is the simplest A, B, and C: Chikusa has abnormally advanced dexterity, speed, and enhanced reflexes. He could knock an insect from a tree with a small stone at a distance of fifty feet; a fish, even in fast-moving water, should not pose an obstacle.

Now, the difficulty here will be more in the matter of procuring the dead fish.

This is where the trident comes into play.

"Wow, Mukuro-san," Ken says. "You sure are clever."

 _Of course,_ he thinks, and climbs atop one of the slick rocks, barefoot.

Of course. He is ingenius, and moreover, the reason they've all survived so long.

Once everyone is in position, it's a matter of standing and watching the water, which Mukuro does, carefully. But this is not a tributary, nor a stream; this is the Po River, and therefore large, and it takes a while, indeed, to make out a target, because time and again, as soon as he actually spots schools of fish, it's too late, and they're too far downriver to safely spear one out. However, he is determined not to give up. It's just a matter of careful watching, and --

There one comes. Ken is gesturing.

"Hit it, Chikusa!" Mukuro calls, all but dancing in place on the rock, waving the trident eagerly. You see, the truth is, he really doesn't _entirely_ trust anyone -- not even the other two boys -- to do a job properly, and so the weapon is a weight in his hands, which are practically itching for action. "Do it now!"

Someone, somewhere, is shouting for him to be careful.

Now, on paper, this had been a very simple A, B, and C prospect, but alas, things are rarely so simple, and so it is that a fast-moving fish in shady water becomes a more difficult target than a sitting insect, and when the rock goes in, the original primary question of whether it hits the fish or not is rendered somewhat irrelevant in light of the new question, that is: _where the hell_ did said fish go.

For half a heartbeat, Mukuro is unmoving, squinting at the water, now wondering about the best method by which to wrap up this foolproof plan --

\-- when, suddenly, it's below him, before him, in reach of him, and all other thoughts are forgotten, and Mukuro pitches the trident forward, aiming directly for the fish.

Which he impales.

 _Perfect,_ he thinks.

And this, the last thought before -- over-balanced, his weight pressed too forward on river-soaked rock -- his feet slip, and down he goes headfirst into the currents.

A crack, unconsciousness, and the next thing Mukuro knows he is spitting water, wondering where that fish went, with Ken kneeling over him, sobbing amid _pyon, pyon_ s, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, and suddenly pushing closer as though he's about to kiss Mukuro full on the lips (it is, in actuality, an ill-formed attempt at mouth to mouth), at which point Mukuro's eyes go wide and, reflexively, he punches him in the stomach.

"Ah," he says, when realization dawns. "Sorry."

And then Mukuro vomits out a chunk of the Po River and loses consciousness again.

~*~  


The following two days consist of wavering in and out of feverish awareness with the other boys scarcely leaving his side, ill-equipped as they are for caretaking of this nature. Mukuro wakes long enough to consume food and drink and wobble off to see to his body's needs, and then he lies back down again.

At some point, he is relatively (but not entirely) certain he clasps one of each of their hands and utters, _don't let them take me alive_ , dramatically punctuated with gasping breaths.

Yes, yes, come to think of it, he must have said this, because he _is_ entirely certain Chikusa replied with, "Alive is not really the problem, sir."

Mukuro smiles thinly, thinking: _You don't have to be so brave for my sake._

"It's okay to cry," Mukuro says.

"You have a fever, Mukuro-sama," Chikusa replies.

"It's cold," Mukuro says.

Ken licks him across the face.

Mukuro remembers the scientist and vaguely wonders whether Ken will eat him when he dies, too.

He isn't quite certain what he thinks of that line of query, so he decides to leave it.

"It's the beginning of another cycle," he adds, at some point, when memory returns to him, and then he drifts off again.

Two days after Mukuro took a tumble, head first, into the river, he is back on his feet, whole and hale save for a broken arm, a hairline leg fracture, and an occasional nagging headache from the concussion. Within a week, the broken arm and the hairline fracture are also curiously mended. The headaches vanish. Overall, he realizes it is just as he has said: _Death is merely the beginning of another cycle._ He has been brought back to life once again, and why not? After all, he thinks, his work in this world has not yet been completed. In fact, it has scarcely begun. The river water is not a sea of blood, and Mukuro has not yet erased every single mafiosi scum (in fact, during this brief and wild era, the concept of mafia is forgotten entirely as a construct of distant society). His soul cannot rest until these goals have been met.

Barefoot, dirty, peacefully malnourished, Mukuro dedicates the majority of his time during these tentative, grasping months to investigating the possession potential of cats and birds and beetles and frogs and snakes.

There is still the matter of perfecting the illusions, but Mukuro's creations are already passable enough that most of the oblivious adults never look twice. Illusions, possessions, battle skills, and animal summonings. The summonings, in fact, pave way for certain of the possessions, but the wilder side of the Po Valley also teems with small life.

Simpler creatures, at times, prove exceedingly difficult to control.

Their minds are too uncomplicated to adequately house Mukuro's consciousness, and the most basic of animals act largely on reflexes -- lightning-fast directional gestures prompted by some external stimulus.

Birds prove an especial headache, and Mukuro inadvertently sends more than one sparrow careening into accidental, wasteful death: against trees, windows, or a simple plummet to the ground. The animal's mind, in opposition to his own, jerks like a machine gone awry, and when it is over, he is left with a mild throbbing in his temples from the sickening vertigo of dying.

Animals, he thinks, are purely utilitarian. Tools.

So are humans, but a human you might hold antipathy for.

There is no bitterness present towards non-sentient beasts. No sense that they must be avoided or destroyed. Mukuro does not go out of his way to ensure that they survive, but their deaths are collaterial damage; small lives are -- as he has learned from his experience at the hands of adults -- expendable.

Many times, Mukuro finds himself watching hawks wheel above the sky, or listening to owls screech in the dead of the night, and he thinks: _If only I could take a bird of prey._ Such a catch would be far superior to the little, breakable ones he has possessed thus far.

There are other forms of life with which he experiments.

There is, once, a time in which he and Ken uncover a hornet's nest and Mukuro, eyes alight, inquires in a particular flash of brilliance, "What if I were able to possess this entire swarm?"

This is, curiously, yet another idea which sounds more innovative on paper, but Chikusa is kind enough to apply salve to the swollen red places (of which Ken acquires more, somehow). Mukuro thinks that smiling rather hurts, though he is still smiling that evening, thinking something like: _Nothing ventured, nothing gained._

And certainly his eye will open again by tomorrow, won't it? Therefore, no matter.

Soon, the time will come for much more complicated possessions.

Civilization is not to be avoided forever.

No tree was ever felled by shunning.

 _Soon,_ Mukuro thinks -- because they, too, have needs that cannot be met exclusively in the wilds. _Very soon._

And then?

We shall see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (to be continued.)


	7. the violet hour

> .oxo. 7

A man can only go so far when living entirely in the wilds, and children (verging, in their case, upon _feral_ children) have a shorter ability even within such parameters.

Valley to road and back again, Mukuro wanders to and fro with the others, and as the streets wind, they cross paths with cities. What distance have they traversed since Bologna? Mukuro is not certain, but the autumnal-wintry mists have begun to grip the Italian countryside and the valley, and he understands in an instinctive -- even primal -- way, that soon the cold will clench them in a strangling grasp, and the time will come to seek shelter.

Half-formed plans -- the papier-mâché concoctions of months of practice -- formulate quietly, never fully explained even to the other boys, and before sufficient time has elapsed for the coming of winter, when the leaves are golden, they find themselves within another city. Parma, encircled perhaps half a dozen times during the course of the circuitous river trip, beyond Modena and Carpi and Reggio and Correggio: Mukuro is certain, based on half-heard conversations and half-asked inquires that this is north, that the first city was Bologna, and that there are trains which run, and with a little magic, a little singing for his supper, he will procure a fee, and travel will be easier.

Though no less dangerous.

More dangerous, isn't it? To be amongst _them._

The school uniforms have returned, in full bloom again, and Ken _still_ fails to understand.

"It isn't about going to school," Mukuro explains, ever patient with incomprehension. "It's about the way it _looks._ It's funny, don't you think? Pretending."

This world is a game of make-believe. Why shouldn't they have fun? The joke is in the humour of irony: look at them! Running about wild, dressed in school uniforms, all while never attending. Everyone's favourite sons, nephews, brothers, diligent little pupils.

It seems honestly intuitive, as with chameleons.

Does Ken have a chameleon channel?

Mukuro glances at him.

Thinks: No, probably not.

"Watch," Mukuro says, while they walk down the streets, and then he sprints over to the nearest woman -- a tourist, to judge from the appearance of the camera she's holding (frozen, momentarily, in snapping a photograph of _Palazzo del Governatore_ ) -- and he readies his pose: hands clasped behind his back, chest outward, teeth locked together in a grin (with a face that is dirty but not _too_ dirty; the adults like just enough on a boy to add character, he's found), eyebrows carefully neutral, innocent, not too furrowed into an angry V (he's been looking into the river and illusioning himself rather a lot, of late!), and gently, softly, adding just the proper amount of chime and jingle, he says: "Buongiorno, signorina!"

Now, when she turns, Mukuro steps back a little and scratches his head. Shy, deferential -- that's what the adults want in a boy.

And the snippet of Italian: well, that's important for authenticity, really, and tourists are impressed and charmed by a little Italian-speaking child. Look at him; he fits right in with the scenery, leaving aside any ethnicity queries, and even that becomes a matter of: squint, double-check, wonder -- yes, but none shall ask.

The woman explains in crude Italian that her skills with the language are poor.

"Flower?" Mukuro asks in English, taking a guess, and he reaches down, then up, opening his palm to reveal a lotus in full bloom. The wobbly quality of his English is, at least, not a ruse. He's picked up a smattering of English, Spanish, and French, but nothing truly substantial as of yet. "Four euros. Very pretty! For a pretty lady!"

Nine times out of ten, it's a successful ploy, and this is no exception.

Pavlov's dog: Mukuro keeps playing tricks.

The money is deposited into Chikusa's current hat (purchased from previous expeditions, in a similar vein), which is then set on the cobblestone.

"But what about when it disappears?" Ken asks, concerning the lotus."What of it?" Mukuro replies. "She'll have seen magic, at least."

It's all most adults want, really. A little magic to spice the tedium of their dull and witless lives.

And Mukuro defies that for which he has named himself, because he is alive in this vast world, amid the murmur of wandering tourists and the swish-swish of the fountain waters and the dying roar still in their ears from the river which they've abandoned and the river in which he almost died once more, and he could run, skip, and cartwheel, but that he leaves to Ken's energies -- for his own are the more tender reverberations of the mental landscape, though he does feel the urge, when he looks at the square. Mukuro wants to cartwheel; he wants to walk on his hands and frighten the adults, and stick out his tongue like a daemonic spirit, and stun them with his wildness and powers, and possess them. And wouldn't it be funny -- were someone to call an exorcist? But never mind. It's too reckless; it's all too reckless, these thoughts he's having on this day in the autumnal-winter-summer of Italy, of Parma.

Ken scrunches his nose at the hat. "Will a rabbit come out?" he asks.

"But that would be cliché." Mukuro touches his chin.

"What?"

"Never mind." Wave of the hand. "No, no rabbits. I think not."

" _A steak!_ "

Mukuro very nearly headbutts him, then remembers somehow that such behaviour is not in accordance with being old and wise and sagely and having been revived many times, or through many reincarnation cycles, or what-have-you that he has convinced himself of.

"What nonsense." He laughs. "I had thought a severed head, but -- "

"It's a little too dramatic, sir," Chikusa agrees (somehow ascertaining the unspoken trouble).

Mukuro mock-sighs; rather, he breathes out heavily through the nose, like a sigh, and deflates, but the grin does not leave his lips. It's been crafted, now, lacquered through this timeless year, and he is never so easily put off from his goals.

Although he has become quite adept with fashioning lotuses from the aether, Mukuro has already expended that particular trick during the day's adventure, and besides, a flower from a hat would be rather trite in any case.

It must be something fantastic, but not so fantastic as to open him for scrutiny, and therein lies the problem.

He could, if he so chose, pull a table and chairs and cups of tea from the hat. He could make the cups dance and the tea flow up like a fountain, and then, Mukuro could put his head above the skywards trickle and drink, and wouldn't it be a pretty sight?

But they would probably not appreciate it -- those evil adults. Those wicked adults. They would place him right back below the ground, as if trying to bury him so that his next death would be final.

As if they were trying to send him to hell (a second time).

Or perhaps they would summon their priests: _Look, maman, at this evil boy._

In the end --

Mukuro produces, from the depths of the hat (which is not, one notes, a top hat, but it will serve), _ananas comosus_ , spiky edible fruit, of the more common term _pineapple_ , tropical and hence a miracle itself in Italy with its grape vineyards and dawning winter fogs.

"It means," he informs a minor congregation of adults. "-- absolute perfection!"

A magician's hat trick is a very simple skill often reserved for impressing children at their birthday parties or other gatherings; most adults are acquainted with the basic devices which facilitate the apparition of the rabbit or bouquet. The _trick_ \-- in this particular demonstration among stones and pigeons -- lies in the role reversal thereof. This is no grown and hardened street magician, but rather a precocious, fearless little boy (with the ever-smiling face which never ceases, wide as a beam of sunlight caught in his teeth) who is performer rather than captive audience, who swaggers and struts and _kufus_ softly as he turns the hat over, shaking it out as if dumping its invisible contents before he pulls the pineapple from the unseen midst of the event horizon.

Then: a second fruit (a proper encore), and the crowd claps -- slowly, wonderously, and (Mukuro thinks) a little grudgingly, a little uncertainly, as if unwilling to give their all to a child, when really, they are thinking to condescend to him with that voice reserved for children, with down-looking eyes and pats to the forehead, if they dare or care to attempt an approach.

The tourist ghosts (so he is still thinking of them, then) seldom have an interest in touch. At least.

He is a curiosity at best. And his demonstration, he can see, has earned him the respect of distance; bodies in a circular viewing, impressed but maybe in an unnerved manner, as of those who view walkers on lit coals; he's done nothing like that, but there's a kinship, maybe: _How did that child perform such a feat?_ their eyes ask one another. The mechanism is common knowledge, a sleight of hand, or an object beneath a table, and yet -- and yet there was no table, no hidden door, nothing they might perceive, and it couldn't fit up his sleeves (which are tattered, you see, and short, besides), so what, then; what sublime trickery was this, now?

And Mukuro twiddles his thumbs behind himself and puffs his chest out and collects their coins, dousing each in turn with silent contempt. Whole smiles worth of silent contempt.

You looked right toward me and you saw what you wished to see.

Who's the fool? Who's the child?

"You really like those, Mukuro-san," Ken says, and it's ambiguous to Mukuro's ear as to whether there's a hidden meaning, but he dislikes something about the tone, and so he answers,

"I like the meaning of that fruit, Ken. And that's all," he lies, omitting mention of past dreams of fairies and mermaids, because he is after all going to be seven in a few months, and so practically an adult, and such matters must be laid to rest along with other childhood dreams. "Chikusa, listen. You can juggle, can't you?" -- and here Mukuro is beaming hopefully, in that I-have-all-the-answers-and-know-what's-best-for-us way that is meant to be an assurance for the other boys (and is, in point of fact, though it also has a tendency to make lumps form in their stomachs, and not entirely from pleasure). He has never witnessed Chikusa juggling, but considering his capabilities run in the direction of superhuman feats of physical coordination, it would be highly surprising were he anything less than a natural.

The tinkle of coins on cobblestone -- every one in three gilded-bordered euros dropped from the hands of passersby misses the hat's rim -- rings like rain, a soft background theme song, and Mukuro envisions ice cream and chocolate sundaes and floats and fondue, downy beds in sunlit rooms, watery ripple of curtains in a breeze, a stone terrace and a rose garden beyond the half-opened window. Mukuro has seen this place before: In his conscious daydreaming mind, in hell when he has walked through still, lifeless worlds, and in his dreams, before the ground split with fire and blood choked the roses in a torrential downpour, a storm of brimstone and unmaking.

So his dreams end, always.

He has wondered, half-waking, if the sunlit room were a memory, if the roses had truly been glimpsed with this body's eyes in another life (in hell, he almost thinks, automatic, but this, this image originated before hell, were it more than a fancy), before these other lived and ended lives, before he counted needle pricks or phrenological mappings or webbed, stitched paths of veins inked to tattoos and opened and sewn across his arms and legs with the finest of modern technology.

(The truth becomes: when Mukuro pronounces the substance with which he will bathe the world, he means his own, now poisonous with abuse, running mercurial, like his entire character's nature would suggest, or so he would claim. The vampires die again at me.)

A clean and sunlit room. A rose garden. Maybe it is the dream of another, ensnared in the net of his own consciousness. Mukuro shakes his head, and stoops to collect the coins.

"Juggling," Chikusa repeats. And Mukuro knows what he's doing when he repeats a word like that. Alongside the unnatural muscular reflexes, somehow their former _caretakers_ have imbued him with another unnatural ability: that of conveying an almost-polite and almost-rude and almost passive aggressive distaste and disdain between the margins of syllables, a talent for which he excels. Case in point: "Hm."

That is: _Hell no._

But not in practice. In practice, he and Ken will do all that Mukuro might suggest. And Mukuro idly and curiously wonders why, sometimes.

I am God, he could answer himself. _Buddha, Boddhisattva, the saviour to these children._ Partial truth, truth in lies. _They are my dolls._ But he is not, at present, pulling strings. Not of the physical tethers. More subtle ones, then. And he will never ask: _Do you love me?_ because he has never known what is meant by this word, and the encyclopedias and movies and lives for which he has reference are woefully confusing. Love is the best and love is the worst. It knots the genitals and the stomach, produces obsessions, causes you murderous levels of jealousy; love is not particularly prone to starting wars, save for those in myths, and that was beauty, in the first place. So love is also a scapegoat. This Mukuro knows of that term: the most vaunted quality of the humans, but in abstract, and in literature. Often false, a romantic notion of selflessness that he honestly suspects is anything but. Self-serving egotism projected outward, genital knots and all, and it has little relevance within this sphere of quiet understanding. Or, in Ken's case, very loud and boisterous understanding, but something of a contract nonetheless.

It's survival instinct which binds them one to the other.

And, ironic name to the contrary, no one exists in pure survival mode so much as does Rokudo Mukuro.

Besides, he is still relatively certain Chikusa has been lobotomized, and Ken's brain is as likely a candidate for grey matter transplant, artificial alteration exchange with a canine's, as any Mukuro has known of. It would scarcely surprise him.

And so of course they approve of leadership.

Not because they are deficient, or pathetic. No, he does not think of them in such terms, either. It is because they are not leaders.

(You know they were never engineered to be.)

So Chikusa juggles.

Rocks, at first, for this is what Mukuro finds most easily. Dislodged stones.

"Pineapples!" (Ken)

 _"No."_ (Mukuro)

 _Severed heads._ (Mukuro, but not aloud.)

 _"No."_ (Chikusa)

(How did you hear that?)

Chikusa pushes up his glasses. Doesn't answer again.

Stones first, then sticks, then Mukuro ties bundles of cloth to the ends of the sticks and sets them on fire, so then Chikusa is juggling sticks with flames on the tips, which is all well and good, and even Mukuro is clapping, appoving beyond that ever-mocking serpentine smile (more whimsical on the face of youth), but _then_ the cloth burns out, and the sticks themselves catch fire, and Chikusa looks curiously at Mukuro, who says, "Oh, throw them way up high, Chikusa!"

And when he does, the flames swell, and the sticks burst into lotus flowers, and Mukuro, chin in hand, laughs, and a stunned murmur ripples through the crowd. _See how you're my toys?_ he thinks of the adults. _Reacting on cue._ And it's the only way his mind can make this exchange palatable. It's the only way he can accept their soiled currency.

The rain of flaming lotuses is by far Mukuro's favourite bit of street magic.

Soon he learns that it procures the most coins, far more than any amateur hat trick, but he has to be careful; it will not do to alert onlookers to the reality behind his "magic." Bologna is close enough. Some of the ghosts could guess. Some may be in the know. Some may work for that _Famiglia_ , or for others who belong to an alliance. Some may simply recognize the production of a rare piece of technology. It's a wide world. Mukuro has heard of stranger things -- guns that can displace a body through one decade. He is an end unto technology itself, a living weapon, though his illusions mask the scars, the ley lines of unseen gears, and demarcations.

Still, some might see. Some might have the eyes for it.

After Mukuro's fireworks, Ken says, "Look! I'm the monkey boy! I ran off from the circus!" And the adults give him money, too, and they laugh. "I was raised in a zoo, and sold to the circus, and then I ran off, here with the pineapple king and that stupid four-eyes --" _Pyon, pyon,_ the intermittent punctuation. "-- and he's pretty awful and boring kakipi. Stupid kakipi! But Mukuro-san is great! The great pineapple king!"

And then Mukuro actually does headbutt him, and people roar, convinced they are watching an impromptu comedy routine. Only, their gazes at one another say, where is the adult in charge of this troupe of children? Who set them up to behave like this? Are they boy actors from one of the Italian theaters, perhaps?

"The one in the glasses has talent," someone says in the crowd. "That's for sure. I've never seen a child pretend to be so stoic. He could be a famous actor someday."

By nightfall, the hat is brimming with coins.

Mukuro buys the boys each two scoops of chocolate gelato in glasses with little stems, run through by rivers of confectionary cream, with waffle biscuits, fruit purees, and chocolate syrup. Two more scoops for himself.

Once his own cup is empty, he realizes the extent of his ongoing hunger, and then he buys them bread loaves, and even deli meats and cheese, and they make sandwiches outside, in the crisp air.

Chikusa's glasses are broken beyond repair. He's been relentlessly piecing them back together with odds and ends, bits of tree gum and sticky substances, and he suggests to Mukuro that they visit a store and buy some actual tape so that he may fix them properly, please and thank you. Mukuro says, "Why not simply get new ones?"

But in practice, the logistics of doing so prove complicated. If there are any opthamologists in Parma, Italy, Mukuro cannot locate one, and he suspects there would be a requirement of an eye exam, the signature of a parent or guardian on a black line on a document somewhere or another -- so it always goes -- and glasses can be expensive, the cost far exceeding their earnings from strangers.

"I could take someone," Mukuro says, considering, for it is always an option.

He has not possessed any adult human beings. Not since that day.

He has possessed small birds and snakes and beetles and cats and dogs. Once, newest of all, he possessed Ken and Chikusa. They sat on their knees, looking from one to the other, and Mukuro informed them of his intentions, and Ken said, "Sure, Mukuro-san!" And Mukuro smiled at him and touched his head with one hand, and said, "This won't hurt, you see." And with the other hand, purposeful as one of the cursed doctors with their incoming needles, Mukuro nicked Ken's cheek, so the blood ran, pencil-thin, red as a thermometer line.

Then Ken's hands touched Ken's face, smearing, and one came away greased by that same shade of red. A palm mark, like a large and sloppy kiss. Only too dirty to be lipstick.

In Ken's body, Mukuro had felt the niggling, submissive-but-happy consciousness, a tail-wagging puppy, bouncing in the brain's secret recesses, up and down and up again, entranced by the force of possession, and were Mukuro another kind of person, he might feel disturbed by the implications, by the exhilaration of imprisonment, by the willing captivity, but Mukuro is Mukuro, and Ken, afterwards, says, "That was awesome!" and licks Mukuro's face. "Mukuro-san is the best."

Chikusa had been different. A stranger, as always. Inside of him, Mukuro had flexed his fingers and felt the ease of double jointed hypermobility.

Chikusa is an entire study in anatomy, and though Mukuro knows _double jointed_ may be a misnomer, so these knee joints could turn backwards, these thumbs could bend away to the wrists, these shoulder blades could shoot out in foreign, sharp manners as the body uncoils, spring-like. Fearful symmetry. No wonder, then, that he survived the fire. These elongated, wiry, elastic pieces are not fully human, not fully flesh and blood, but infused with materials of whose names none of the boys know; they're in the length of the legs, the hump of Chikusa's back, the oddness of his posture, indicative in how he turns, and the way objects roll from his wrist to middle finger and out like shots of gunfire.

Intriguing. Highly intriguing. Mukuro jotted down mental notes.

Chikusa's mind had been different from Ken's, predictably. Much different. Sedate, far away; cold, analytical, irritated easily by any hint of distraction, by the buzzing of flies, by noise, by uncleanliness, therefore by all things Ken -- exasperated by disorder, exasperated by social conventions, by life, by small talk, by pointless rituals, and by almost everything. And yet, beneath the rigid corners, Mukuro had felt an expanse like a dark lake at the bottom of a cave, a deep well of loyalty, unspoken and bottomless. It was not like Ken's, not jolting like waves rushing in from a sea, and yet, in a way, it felt no less intense for its enormity, for its eyeless, thoughtless, formless fluidity, without shape and without borders and without words, only the instinctual draw of a child to a familiar voice, a salmon moving upstream before dying, leaves turning brown because that is what is natural and orderly.

Mukuro sees himself in Ken: The coolest person. Exciting. Alpha male. Pack leader. Smells good. Tastes kind of fruity. But also good. A wild approval.

Mukuro sees himself in Chikusa: Natural and orderly, accorded loyalty without end. Necessary, in fact, for sanity. For identity. For understanding. For life. The sunrise in the morning.

Neither questions his merit. Neither ever will.

Their relationships exceed the limits of nouns and verbs and language altogether, slipping into between spaces of preternatural womblike life needs and dependence.

Mukuro thinks: _I understand._ And he does. And he lets them go, back to their bodies. To their selves, which are also irrevocably his. Him. Them. One soul in all things.

It was not like when Mukuro possessed the scientists, and he knows it will be unlike when he possesses other adults. But since that day, he has been dormant. Experimenting, but not prepared to leap into another grown-up's foreign consciousness. Not yet. Oh, he wants to. The risk, though. That's something to consider. He is a small person with small feet that patter in tiny ways on cobblestones, though his shadow grows long, and while his audacity knows no limitations, he is not one to gamble on the tumbling down of existence, not when he might be caught, not when he might again feel the pinch of needles, the weakening of a body drained by blood. Not that again, no.

So he trails the adults, sometimes. Cautious. Wary. Interested. But he does not lunge. Does not come within swiping distance with the metal end of the trident. _They will see. They will know._ Someday, he will. He cannot deny it. Someday, but --

Children are another story.

Another child is easy prey. Easy to lure.

Mukuro says, "Look what I found." Holds up the trident and beckons to a back alley. "Isn't it neat? Don't you want to see?" Motions with his hand.

And sometimes, especially to other little boys: "I dare you to touch it."

And there they go, eager puppets blind to their strings.

They grasp with curious, jerky, sometimes aggressive hands, _let me see, let me see, what is it, where did you find it_ , and Mukuro marks them, or they mark themselves in their haste, and before they can pull back their fingertips to bite and suck the beading blood, their mouths laugh his laugh, behind gritted teeth, a strained too wide smile.

In the end, Mukuro possesses another boy, and in the interval before he returns the body to its previous owner, he has it remove its spectacles. Gently, he replaces Chikusa's with these new ones.

Mukuro lifts the broken glasses from his companion's nose and discards them.

"There," he says, with his usual pre-pubescent air of all-knowing authority. "Much better."

Except there is one problem.

The prescription on these glasses does not match the particular troubles which affect Chikusa's eyesight in its natural state. For that matter, Mukuro, even after possessing Chikusa, has no idea whether he is actually near-sighted or far-sighted. He is not remotely sure of what astigmatism entails, and even if he were, he would not know if this boy whose glasses he _acquired_ was afflicted with the condition or not.

Chikusa, whose state of vision has perhaps never actually seen a proper diagnosis, simply says, "Hm," and does not bother to correct any of Mukuro's assumptions.

Everyone is content. The boys saunter on.

They each take turns drinking from Parma's polycast fountains, sticking their heads and mouths beneath twinned fish, lions, the faces of gods.

Mukuro has never been so thirsty as he is during this week. The clear fountain water triggers his desire to keep imbibing, and the bread and meat and cheese increase his hunger, until his previous condition of comfortably malnourished feral child, twig-limbed, is no longer acceptable, and he is realizing that this cannot continue indefinitely.

One night in Parma, he lies with the other two, with their arms wrapped around him for warmth, yet somehow the cold bites through their stolen blankets, once property of loved little boys' rooms, which Mukuro, in emotionless anger, made them relinquish unto him when he took their skins.

And Mukuro knows Ken and Chikusa are having a reprieve from their nightmares, for their bad dreams have ebbed. He has touched their minds, felt the old turmoils slough off like old, useless scabs, in the wake of a long, new peace, and he does not rouse them, no, but his own mouth forms soundless syllables, counting and rehearsing.

His own eyes are open and wide.

This, Mukuro realizes, is his gift from the other two: the weight of the world.

The imparting was accidental. But the acceptance was not.

He cannot wake them, cannot tell them. They cannot be allowed to know.

For the first time in living memory, Mukuro is uncertain, perhaps afraid. And this -- so alien that it takes him long moments, three quiet hours in the night of mute searching, as if groping along blindly, before he has at last realized what it is that he is feeling.

Fear, you see, he recognizes because he has experienced it in others: in the undeveloped minds of beasts who claw at his invading consciousness, wanting him gone. He heard fear in the children in hell. He felt it in the reverberations of their sobs.

Fear from everyone in that room, drenching the corners in sweat and tears. Fear had been the colours of the walls, the contents of the dishes, the liquid on knife points, in cylinders, draining from their pores and veins and eyes. All of the children, save for Mukuro.

He had grown to this age in a universe made of the background radiation of human terror.

But it had never touched him.

 _Nothing was real, then,_ he thinks, and rolls over.

 _When I was alone, under that grey sky, and in the brown grass._ He remembers it: that world he made. Mukuro used to step into it when the pain and the noise became excessive, too much for him.

He smells Ken, musky and unwashed. Chikusa, somehow sterile, still like medical gloves.

"I did say I would change this world," he whispers. And he did. And he said it, and he believed it, and believes it. He invited them. They have come with him across Italy. Across fields. Down rivers. Into hostile cities haunted by demons. They sleep, homeless, in the shadow of the church. And they're starving. "So I will. So I must."

For us.

"But not like this. I can't do this for much longer," he whispers because he knows they will not hear, and what he means, he adds, "Not alone."

He hates knowing what he must do.

 _I must let them possess me again,_ he thinks, head bowed as if in defeat, which he will not know for many years to come. _I must let them have me again._ Them. Those people. That world.

Thinks: We'll have food. The starving won't continue. And you can get the right glasses, Chikusa.

After all (rueful smile), you aren't very useful to me like this, are you?

Mukuro sleeps and dreams through six hells of nightmares.

There's a tremor in one hand come morning, like palsy; Mukuro hides it as best he may, relying on his other for the time being.

"Let's go to church," he says. He's looking up. It's a vision. Holy. From him. From God. From Mukuro. "Confess our sins," he jokes.

"It isn't Sunday, Mukuro-sama," Chikusa says, and for once, he sounds less sarcastic and more genuinely perplexed. _Concerned,_ Mukuro knows, and laughs: _He thinks I'm mad._ And he is mad, and it's wonderful.

But they will not question his merit, even in madness. Maybe especially not in madness.

The Duomo, Cathedral of Parma, boasts within its interior an immense artwork depicting the rise of the Virgin at the efforts of musical angels: _The Assumption of the Virgin,_ Antonio da Correggio, a fresco of a style appropriately called _illusionistic_ , with foreshortening and spatial effects enough so that the painting grows in appearance, as if three-dimensional, as if heaven is above their heads, as if angels fly and sing and the untouched mother rises and goes with her son, and Mukuro enters, orphaned.

There is a touring choir of girl singers who whisper and point and look away.

There are matronly women. Men in suits. Visitors.

Mukuro ignores them. Walks forward, to a display of a candelabra, and lights it with his fingertip, and looks, looks at a man in a suit, with a cane, with a ring on his finger, with many rings, with a creased face, a man who is watching intently. He saw the man that morning. Saw him go in. Guessed at his identity. At a piece of it.

"God told me to come," he says in a tremulous voice, filling it with wonder, though it's really another emotion, now. "And God told me to find you. To ask you ..."

"Yes," says the older man, striding forward. "That's quite a miracle, when some say the age of miracles has passed." And his eyebrows have lifted, but Mukuro thinks, he isn't that surprised, and he thinks: You know who I am. "A sign, no doubt."

A hand, arthritic, outstretched. Fingers on a brow.

Venomous snakes in the stomach at the sight of those insignia, but Mukuro smiles.

"You look hungry," says the man. "And there's rain in the forecast."

And upon learning they're homeless, he tells them that the snows will be coming, and it's not fitting, boys being out in the snows.

His own children are grown. He has grandsons and granddaughters of an age with these boys, he informs the three of them, but he works with people, you see -- he has hired help, people with no sons, no daughters, people who could love a child, and children need love, and children don't need to be in the snow, and all the while, Mukuro thinks, raw with hate: _You know who I am._

He dreamed, the night before, and sees it, today:

A sunlit room, and rosebushes outside, and this too, someday, will choke with venom, will drown with blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ yes, the fic references a lot of omake jokes. PINEAPPLE = absolute perfection (its flower/fruit meaning). all forms of pineapple. I found Ken's omake obsession charming. secret bullet novels and drama CDs and other side/additional extra-canonical material will also eventually be worked into this story. +_+
> 
> +next chapter, bluh bluh, LANCIA STUFF, because that's how I roll.  
> \+ how does the trident work, anyway? I figure it is somehow a part of Mukuro, thus why he didn't lose it in the river in the last chapter, and so on. lol trident.


	8. but I will build a new beginning // and I will start my own religion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ a friend pointed out the language issue of using honorifics when the characters are ostensibly speaking Italian. I should note -- I do that for readers' benefits, and because imho those honorifics don't translate very well. "Mister Mukuro" and "Master Mukuro" sound a little off to me somehow. I DID write Ken calling Mukuro "Mister Mukuro" (as such) when they first met, but I actually wrote it that way, at the time, specifically to show they'd just met.
> 
> ... UH, I guess what I'm saying here is, I'm taking a lot of liberties with language for connotative purposes (some of the jokes also behave as if the characters are really speaking English), so I hope readers will be patient with me, there!
> 
> \+ ages -- I know Ken and Chikusa are a year younger than Mukuro. I think I've collectively referred to them as six somewhere? if I did -- fudging it a little, assuming some of this took place when their ages sort of aligned in between birthdays and all...
> 
> \+ I know Lancia is from Northern Italy. I'm just situating the stronghold itself in Taormina because I liked some of the ref. pics I could find of Sicilian settings, and also to use certain locales for later :> ... think this covers all the pertinent notes.

> .oxo. 8

Situated in Taormina, Sicily, the stronghold of the _Famiglia_ Da Luca springs forth in the arabesque form of a true Mediterranean villa, choking within a leafy noose of lavender and shocking pink bougainvillea, chunks and clusters, thick and bushy, and in the yard grow olive trees, hibiscuses, the ever-abundant poplars of Italy.

The worst of the floral explosion, however, is primarily confined to the backyard; the front, now -- the front is clean-trimmed in that patrician way, shrub-bordered, where the plants themselves take on the appearance of sentinels, soldiers against the outside world, all grass of uniform height, cut circular around the fountain from which three sprays of water gleam in the air. There's something stark about this place, something -- Mukuro thinks -- troubling about the precision in the shape of the plants, the order of the windows, the single overhang among them, and the blood-rust colour of the panels.

It's perfect, that is, by the adult meaning of perfection.

"I don't know -- " Mukuro says in his _sweetest_ voice -- "how you can buy all this, Mister. It sure seems expensive."

"I certainly didn't purchase it all by myself, of my own income, as you may think of it," says the old man, for they are standing together in one of the villa's spacious libraries (which seem to manifest, monstrous, at each turn and in all corners); his rings still shimmer in the darkening shrouded half-light of the curtained room, and he walks with the faintest limp (Mukuro has noticed; Chikusa, too, observed, made verbal note, a whisper), leaning heavily upon his cane, his eyes akin to the eyes of the portraits on the wall. The eyes of generations, deceptively gentle. Mukuro watches. Learns. "But you are very young. Too young, I think, to be worrying upon such matters as economy."

He says it, you see, with that bare tightening about the mouth, that sense of a suppressed sigh, sagging shoulders which lift again within an instant. He says it, you see, as though it is the world's most exhausting conundrum: economy.

"Let us say, my child -- " (He does speak robustly, like so, and with too great of a familiarity, like so) "-- that as some houses are built upon pillars of sand or wood or stone, so this household is built upon the work of my _Famiglia_ , my alliances, my associates and my friends. My people. I did not buy this alone, no. It is more than a house in which I have invited you and your friends to live. In this villa, there are many generations. In this villa," and he finishes, "-- is the blood of my _Famiglia._ "

 _Not yet,_ Mukuro thinks as he extracts a book with great care, and the fading sunlight catches his smile.

~*~

Rokudo Mukuro sleeps on a bed for perhaps the first time in his life on this night.

But first, he lies awake, lies in the embrace of the other two, for they rest before he does, as has come to be the way of it.

There was a time, Mukuro remembers, during those first nights in that first ephemeral summer, when Ken would stay up stalking through the reeds, and Chikusa would prowl about, and they would take turns with sentry duty, standing guard over his own resting body, and he would give over to his nightmares and wake in those glow-worm spattered bright-dark misty mornings, jittery nerves like one possessed, but somewhere along the way, they must have exhausted themselves. Somewhere along the way, without anyone commenting upon the change -- as if it has gone unnoticed among all three -- they now sleep as though dead, as though untroubled, without cares, without hunger or fear, and Mukuro blinks in the darkness, blinks with eyes that have seen, eyes that tell the tale, and remember. Ken's breathing is loud, bordering on a snore, ruffling Mukuro's hair (who suspects the accumulation of nightly drool is doing the cowlick in back no favours); Chikusa, predictably, sleeps soundless, barely breathing, as though truly deceased.

Mukuro stands beneath the withered grey sky, the dead leaves of rotten trees; he scratches kanji in the dirt, watches the grass blow away in the wind, leaving brown sand, and the unseen sun bleaches it the colour of bone.

A volcano erupts somewhere, a roar, a thunder-crack; the sky is black now, raining water, raining acid, raining fire. It's white again, a bright room of grey walls, the roar steadying in his ears.

Now it's a heart monitor, now it's a machine, sputtering incomprehensibly, and now it's someone's crying.

A needle above the raw eye: shot number 287.

In the realm of hungry ghosts, their twisted figures lift up their hands, and Mukuro feels nothing. A void, a vacuum, an airless place. But the fire is burning below his feet.

This is a hot _Naraka_.

One further crack, he thinks, and he will fall inside of this hell, and swords will separate his arm at the shoulder.

He looks in that direction.

A knot of stitches, masking the smallpox vaccination shot, which most children have.

Mukuro opens his eyes.

 _Every night, I die once more,_ he thinks, and this, too, is nothing new.

Another, however, is:

There's no bite of the frigid winter air, no feel of torn cloth, either of shirts or of cobbled-together patchwork blankets; the pillow beneath Mukuro's head is stuffed with goose down, the covers heavy. _Warm._ Combined with the body heat of the other two, it's almost overwhelming in intensity, and this is all brand new. Their clothing has been freshly purchased _that very day_ , full outfits -- socks (which Ken, as of yet, stubbornly refuses) and shoes and pants and shirts and jackets and coats, scarves and even tiny mittens, and earmuffs, too, enough for three little boys. What wealth is this, Mukuro wonders? What magic is it that lets one buy all that in a day? In no circumstances could he have afforded such clothing in a lifetime, even in his own vast imagination.

The window is locked. Curtained. Privacy. Quiet. No sounds of the outdoors, no animal cries, no crickets, no sobbing frogs. Insulation. No breeze nipping their heels.

And no empty stomachs, not even that, for their bellies are filled with olives, impeccable burrata cheese, prosciutto ham, and pastries.

Mukuro sits up in bed, covers puddled in his lap, and thinks of success, and thinks of failure.

He has succeeded: they are safe, warm, attended to.

He has failed: It is for him to attend to Ken and Chikusa and himself. No one else.

He departs from the bed. He paces the room.

Mukuro had seen the "kindly" old man enter the church that day. He had noticed the rings, the insignia; he had understood, somehow, intuitively, that approaching the man had been a fact of necessity. Call it knowledge from Before. Call it a hunch. Call it, maybe, a lingering fancy of someone else's possessed mind (information has a way of slipping like water through his fingers, and sometimes even he is not certain what channels bring to mind a particular piece of mental flotsam).

He had reasoned thus:

Speak to the old man. He will take you in.

(He could just as easily have returned you to the bright place.)

This is a home.

This is a prison.

~*~

So it is written: the Son of Man comes like a thief in the night.

Mukuro creeps towards the stairway down which lies the wine cellar. His hand is upon the knob when a voice booms behind his person: "The hour is too late, and for that, you're too young, Rokudo Mukuro."

There is an expression used to describe the condition of being startled. It goes something to the effect of _jumping out of one's skin_.

Mukuro, who has moved beyond his own skin in a most literal sense, has never before so embodied the true meaning of such figurative language.

For one halting, infinite half of a second, he freezes, turns in a semi-arc, his face an icy mask capturing yet another saying -- that of the fawn caught within the glow of headlights. Only, there are no headlights. Not here. Merely the one light, a flashlight which even now throws snakelike pantomiming shadows down into the cellar depths, a phantom night beacon, like a lighthouse upon a distant shore, and beyond the flashlight there stands a giant. A cyclops, Mukuro thinks, or something like it. No, it is Yama, king of hell, come to push Mukuro down into the cellar, which is actually a pit back to that place, to that outer darkness.

"Come on," says the king of hell, his voice great, immense, slightly echo-tinged by the mouth of the stairwell, by the opening to nothingness. "Close the door. If you must, there are sandwiches. Milk." And a pause. "Tea, if you'd like. Come on. Close the door."

~*~

Lancia does not remove his fingerless gloves, not even within the kitchen, and Mukuro watches keenly, his own fingers laced upon the table, as those large, long hands separate sandwiches into methodical halves.

It is a basic motion, unadorned, though Mukuro's eye is transfixed by the manner in which the man moves.

As he makes the singular slice, Lancia pushes down -- pushes forward as if preparing to jam the back of his forearm, elbow and all, against the cutting board. He cuts with his chest and arm and with their attendant weight as much as he can be said to have cut with his fingers; there is a simple, solid effort -- a sturdiness -- which the man embodies, and though he is the most gigantic creature Mukuro has ever seen in his entire life, his hands are not meaty, not sausage-fingered as one might expect, but sharp. Elongated in a graceful way.

He could play an instrument, perhaps, but even now, Mukuro sees plainly enough that those hands are more suited to the gripping of weaponry.

"Ah," Mukuro says, brightly, when the plate is passed to him. "Thank you!"

He straightens his fingers. Reaches for the sandwich. Watches the adult. Watches closely.

Lancia takes his time in joining Mukuro, but when he does, his own plate of sandwich before him, he keeps his eyes level, neither smiling nor frowning, but wearing instead a kind of solemn expression. Call it thoughtful, maybe, or distant; it's difficult to say.

He grips the sandwich (gloves still accounted for) in that same solid, _weighted_ suggestion of motion which, Mukuro soon learns, characterizes his every physical action. There is nothing bird-like about Lancia, nothing fluttering about his digits (he would be, rather obviously, hellishly maladroit with a keyboard), no bounce in his step, none of the slender debonair grace of the old man or the levity of the street-goers, no ghostly priest robes billowing in the wind. He's too large for that. But he isn't, Mukuro notes, a clumsy man. Not awkward. Not in his element, at least. Again, the image of him at a keyboard suggests a man staring in vain at the configuration below him, punching here, pausing, then punching there, cursing in frustration.

Hand him a knife, however, and he's precise. Businesslike.

Mukuro, who has never before encountered an adult sincere enough to uncloak his own human potential for violence -- to wear it in a common manner, visible in daylight and utensils rather than underground gestures, contraband tools -- is intrigued.

"You could have broken something, down there," says Lancia, and Mukuro wonders, briefly, whether he means bones from a tumble down unlit stairways, or bottles in the wine cellar. There's a firmness to him, to his eyes and expression, but it is not unkind, nor even particularly rebuking. He expresses nothing beyond his own view of stark, unpolished truth: "I doubt a boy your age has a taste for wine. I wonder what you were doing." Raps his fingers against the table. "I wonder. But I won't ask."

"I couldn't sleep," Mukuro answers. It is only partially a lie.

"Is your bed comfortable?" This man looks, Mukuro thinks, decisively awkward in the presence of a child his two hands could crush between them like a soccer ball. But is it a social awkwardness, or a fact of size and age and nature? "It must be -- better. Than before."

"Ken snores." Mukuro blows over the rim of the tea, calculating his body language to look appropriately non-threatening. Steam wafts hot against his lips. "He's _really_ loud."

"Hm." Lancia eats quickly, deliberately, silently. He sits back, arms folded at his chest. Mukuro nibbles, presses a lip over the edge of the cup, when it's cooled enough. Watches. "You're -- fortunate, in this one thing, at least. Having friends. Those two."

 _Friends?_ Mukuro grins, and his stomach curdles. _You presume too much._

Aloud: "Oh! That's funny. People don't usually say that about me."

"That you're fortunate?" Lancia strokes his chin.

Emphatic, enthusiastic nod. "But, I am now! Thanks to your nice boss."

If Lancia is charmed by the usual routine -- the strategic exclamations and bursts of high pitched excitement, he gives little if any outward indication.

"It was the same for me." A somber declaration. "When I was of an age with you. It was -- it was similar." Quiet, and then (Mukuro realizes, now, what's coming): "Though I was alone."

"Oh, no. That must've been sad!"

Lancia shakes his head. "Only an old story. I almost did not tell you. A true man of _Cosa Nostra_ does not self-pity, so I say this: I am free, now. My friends are the Family, my true brothers and fathers. Therefore, I am a wealthy man." Grave, so utterly grave, and Mukuro just watches in mute curiosity. "And I am telling you this because I want you to know this, also. Rokudo Mukuro. I will be your elder brother."

 _If you will allow me to be,_ his tone seems to imply, but Lancia does not stoop to ask.

Mukuro realizes, abruptly, that he has been drawn into a secret initiation meeting. Lancia has placated him with food, with conciliatory attempts at empathy, relating the tale of a similar (perhaps) childhood tragedy:

 _Look, my hands are in the air. I mean you no harm._

Mukuro wonders: Did the old man set you up to this? (He must have.) Or are you doing it of your own volition? Is this their way of trying to keep watch over me? (Reach out. Claim kinship. That's it. Do you think I'm stupid?)

But therein lies the most confusing aspect.

Lancia has not spoken to him in the tone common among the other adults.

Nothing about his body language, posture, or choice of words has yet suggested that he views Mukuro with the _benign_ dismissive approach grown human beings offer unto children.

He has not even patronized Mukuro sufficiently to let himself be lulled into easy smiles and laughs -- the natural reactions to a little boy who carries on, as Mukuro is careful, always, to do.

Lancia, who is immense, who is meant to pat his head and softly tell him to run along (who will, as the kindly old man does, ensure that all his needs shall be taken care of -- _but please run along, child_ ), does not do so, and speaks to him levelly, as though he is an equal intellectually. As though he is a significant and rational entity in this world.

As though Mukuro is, for once, seen. Heard.

"Fratello maggiore," Mukuro agrees, eagerly, after a moment of hesitation.

For the first time, Lancia cracks a smile.

"But, ah, I guess I should tell you -- "

And here, Mukuro hunches down, and pushes his hair from his face and ears, presses the knuckles of one hand to his cheek, and, with the other, grips his tea by the handle of the cup. Takes a long swig.

" -- I really don't know how to behave with family."


	9. little white flowers will never awaken you

> .oxo. 9

When I was young, Lancia says, I found trouble. Trouble found me. It was all trouble.

I smoked two packs a day, drank hard liquor in the back alleys, ran with the street gangs. I picked locks. I muscled owners from their Lamborghinis at gun-point, and what money I gained from selling stolen cars, I gambled into nothingness immediately.

Or -- when I kept it, then someone, somewhere, ascertained how I came by my earnings, and then I found myself behind bars.

I was arrested not once, but twice: first for street brawling (I was drunk, angry, I broke both of the man's arms), then for theft.

I began reading the Bible there, in jail, when I was only a little older than twice your age (you are six, aren't you? I was fifteen, going on sixteen).

I wrote a little.

Imagine me, scribbling, and, when I was allowed, hunched over a keyboard (Mukuro smiles, for he has, already). I wrote a little, and thought to write a book, perhaps a memoir. My life behind bars. Or my life before. My dealings. Why not? Others had.

(The internet tells me, he says, that prison memoirs are a legitimate genre, and crime sells.)

But I was frustrated in my efforts. I was no Jean Genet. (Mukuro takes note of that name.)

I didn't write well. The words didn't come. My head would feel misted. I would stare and squint in frustration.

I read. I read every day from the prison library. When I could, I read.

And I prayed.

I talked to God again.

Maybe it won't make sense to you, young as you are. Feeling like a sinner, as I did. I talked to God because at least I could talk. I could wonder if He were listening.

It was better than silence. That's what mattered. It was better than silence.

And one day --

\-- and because of this, I have become truly faithful --

One day, deliverance came.

~*~

  


This story comes not all at once, not related through this linear, clinical style, but rather as a series of scattered, fragmentary conversations.

Lancia teaches Mukuro to play cards.

While they sit at the table, as Lancia shuffles, as he deals, as the man and the boy watch their hands with guarded eyes and shuttered faces (but Mukuro smiles; he never fails to smile), Lancia drops the words in a deep, smooth, rolling timbre. He does not tell his story to Mukuro in the natural order that it happened. Lancia shuffles the events of his life like the cards with which they play, and Mukuro is only able to arrange the deck in order after considerable thought, using much of his own intuition and abilities.

He listens. He remembers.

"Did you ever kill anyone, senpai?" Mukuro asks one day.

Flicker of a glance. Lancia looks up from the cards. Mukuro pretends not to notice.

"No," he answers, "not then. Later. In defense of the _Famiglia._ "

"You're so honest with me."

"Because I want you to understand -- "

 _I do,_ Mukuro thinks. _Thank you._

"You are very young, but I want you to know that how you start in life does not have to have to be the end."

"Ah. Senpai. Are you scared? Don't be scared for me." Mukuro looks at his hand; says, "Senpai, please give me all your threes."

And Lancia does, and he tells him, no, Mukuro, it's not that I'm scared.

(He halts often; he isn't good with this, he explains. Isn't good with putting feelings to words, or anything like that. Just that Mukuro seems to need -- something, and he is his elder brother.)

And Mukuro says, senpai, is it because you're my older brother, my teacher? And this is what teachers and brothers do: they take care of children like me? And Lancia says, yes, something like that. I had no brothers, either. It's just.

(Mukuro wins, sometimes. This game, he loses.)

As they are putting the cards away, Mukuro asks, "Does it make you sad?"

That you had to kill, he does not say.

"No," Lancia responds, without hesitation.

"But." A lick of the lips. Mukuro pauses, fingering the edge of the box. Looks at Lancia with different eyes, a different smile. Wan, lean. Hungry. "Isn't it sad?"

"Death? Yes, death is sad," Lancia says.

"You said, though, that you weren't."

Mukuro sighs the words. Looks down, at his hands.

"It wasn't sad for me, that time. It was necessary. It was that or let them -- " Shake of the head. "It was for my Family. My Family is everything to me. I would kill, if it meant protecting it. Them. I'm a bodyguard, you know."

"And me, too?"

"What are you asking, Mukuro?"

"If someone tried to hurt me," he says, scratching at his elbow. "Would you protect me, senpai?"

"Of course."

"Would you --- do that --- for me?"

A long moment of quiet, and Mukuro almost thinks: He will not answer.

Then:

"If I had to, of course." Shake of the head, and Lancia is rising. "But let's hope it never comes to that. And let's talk of happier things. Mukuro, you're still young. Too young to worry like this."

 _I'm curious about love,_ Mukuro will come to say, years later. _And what people will do for it. It's easy to say, but in practice, what will you do?_

Now, Mukuro puts the box of cards on the counter, and Lancia catches him in an embrace, throws him in the air, like the world is weightless -- a suspended moment, and for a few seconds, Mukuro almost forgets.

~*~

Now, the white prison is made of paper.

Mukuro puts the trident aside, in the space between dreams. A temporary concession. A boy returning his toy to its patient box.

When he entered here, unto this world of threatening material perfection, Mukuro had tried to disguise the gun.

With the fabric of the bundle, with the power of illusions. He'd set it aside, cloaked it, hoped beyond hope and hubris that he might pass through the metal detector of their towering gazes, but everything had failed.

The men of Famiglia Da Luca unwrap the gun, with its prize bullet.

( _Estraneo_ \-- the whisper; Mukuro overhears)

They stand, circular, speaking amongst themselves, speaking of what is Mukuro's, speaking of what he won by silver magic and by blood and by rights. A spoil of war and victory.

"You saw that massacre?" the old man asks.

"I -- yes," Mukuro answers.

A hand, the old man's, against his forearm. Tap of a touch. Pretense of warmth, of comfort. "Do you remember --?"

"There was -- there was so much blood." And Mukuro holds his head, and makes his lip tremble. "I -- I -- "

"It's all right." The mustache-topped lip turns down at the corners. Expression severe. "We can discuss this later, young man." To another: "He's not ready yet."

There's no silver glow. No shadowed corners. No metallic tinge. This new prison is bureaucracy, order, paper. A hunt for birth certificates, for the name of the elusive mother. Blood drawn (Mukuro cringes, shrinks; uncertain, now: is this pretense, still, on his behalf? or -- ), _so that we may know the blood type_ , a fresh round of vaccinations, interrogations about their names (Ken, Chikusa -- they named themselves, Mukuro recalls, and not long after he did the same), their pasts, of which they are silent, or over which they fret, or lie with great care.

"Rokudo Mukuro," one of the doctors eying the papers states, "is not a real name."

He smiles when he says it: You're a charming boy. So you speak Japanese, then?

"It's my name," Mukuro replies, faux-sweetly, sweetest smile.

Afterwards, Mukuro locks himself in his room. Hides under his bed, leaf-like shaking, and dreams of a woman knocking at the door, and he knows she comes to kill him.

In his dream, she is the Virgin of the Pietà: her eyes, comically, horrifyingly, never look upwards, and she is cast in stone, shrouded in stone cloth, stone-skinned, bloodless.

 _Maman, maman._

He is certain, somehow, that he did not kill her (nor his father, or sire) on that day when he ascended from hell. He knows. She is out there. His tangible flesh and blood tie to this world. Waiting to drag him down to the earth with an umbilical cord; ready to wrap it around his neck, noose-like, strangle him and the magic he has cultivated.

 _I am that I am,_ he thinks. _I am alone._

Without family or womb or human connections.

 _I am my own._

Chikusa sits with him. Ken claws the walls in agitation. Mukuro allows their presence, but refuses response.

 _There was no choice, you realize,_ he thinks, rueful, mouth a tight line, eyes still shining with smile, but cold, now. _I did not want to, but --_

"Calm yourself, Ken," he says.

But the doctors have spoken to and about Ken, also.

His prescription in its on its way, Mukuro overhears the old man saying -- not to him, no, never to him. They are not told. He's simply good at overhearing.

Lancia drives the boys to an open air cafè, afterwards.

"I'll take you to the ancient theatre," he offers to Mukuro, who nods, but who is thinking of fast food and bright colours and water parks. He feels restless, somehow. He doesn't know what he wants.

"Don't you ever feel, senpai -- " And this when they're in the car, when Mukuro is in the front seat, alongside the massive driver, watching the hills and tesselated pavements go past outside. "-- that living is about doing things because they're there to do, and not because you want to do them? I go because it's there to go to. Not because it's where I want to be."

Mukuro points outside. "Look, senpai. Look how they go past us, but we're the ones moving. And when you drive at night, it's like the moon chases you everywhere. Chases you in the windows."

Lancia doesn't understand. Doesn't seem to. The adults never do. "Where do you want to be, Mukuro?"

Mukuro considers.

"In a movie," he says. "Somewhere like that place with all the chocolate and the candy flowers."

"I think," begins Lancia, slowing the car as the traffic packs up in the Taormina streets. "-- you simply need hobbies. You, and -- " Nod at the other boys.

"What am I going to do with all these stones?" Mukuro asks of the ruins. Sight-seeing. Maybe it's enough for the adults: simply looking at rocks. Gazing at antiquity, dessicated haunts of ghosts; places which were somewhere, once, and which now are not. "It's all broken and empty and old."

"I come here to remember," Lancia remarks, but does not explain. "And there are only so many places a man can go in this world, Mukuro."

 _No,_ Mukuro thinks -- almost fondly, almost gently. No, there are any number of places to go. Any number of feet to take you there. Any number of minds to inhabit. Maybe you can be content with ruins, shattered palaces, but how am I to slake my thirst on a trickle of dust?

Aloud: "Please, senpai."

Mukuro surges forward, dirty knees, impish flurry; a full seven since the ninth in that impossible Southern Italian summer. Autumn is encroaching, and other things, darker things, places to which he has never been, even in his dreams, and he is half-acting half-sincere (the lines, you see, are blurring) in the rushing frustration of it all, the sobs which choke in his throat (he never cries; the adults have noted as much), grating somehow like a tearing of machinery -- thick-wet, heavy.

"Tell me, please. What makes life mean anything?"

"God," Lancia says, and Mukuro thinks, _I am. I must be._

(Because if there is a supreme being in this world, who designed its present shape, he cannot worship that; he must aspire to improve upon it.)

"Family," Lancia says, rubbing at the side of his face, at the lines of tattoos.

Mukuro nears, and Lancia pulls him closer, idly brushes a hand across the back of his head as if trying to smooth down the tuft (it never works, nor does he ever explicitly voice this as his intent), eyes him with a strange mixture of severity and tenderness. He isn't good with children. Isn't used to children. Mukuro is an alarming child. Mukuro asks sharp questions, damning questions. Lancia is simple, honest. Happy, in a sober way, though often unsmiling -- contrast with Mukuro, now: smiling, yet always anxious.

"You're seven," he says, finally. "Run and play."

But his voice is not hard, not reproachful, and he gathers Mukuro into his arms, and the twilit sunset hangs gauzy purple-red above the ancient theatre, above memories; Italian sunsets are among the most beautiful in the world, and Lancia audibly sighs, and Mukuro actually almost laughs at that. Fond exasperation.

Mukuro grips the lapels of Lancia's suit and wonders whether he will ever be large enough to be a good fit for these threads. He rests his head against those enormous shoulders, against the curve, the firm bone.

"I don't understand why you're so agitated, Mukuro."

Because I had to put my toy away.

They found my spoils of war. They took my bullet, but it's mine.

And the white-coated ghosts, again: They came for me, bled me, told me my name is a lie.

But it is my name. I took it for myself, so how can it possibly be a lie?

Their parents gave them their names, I think. Their names are the false ones.

Isn't it silly, Lancia-senpai? This world where what someone else gives you before you can speak or feel is called the only truth?

They want to put me on documents, on insurance, doctors' certificates, enrollment forms.

And they're going to give something to Ken to make him different and quieter.

(I don't exactly know what, but Ken is mine, too.)

"I had a bad dream, and it scared me."

Mukuro stares at the sunset, stares like it's the only thing in the world.

"You know?" he begins, softly, a sing-song whisper. "You're the only one I trust. Out of them. Thank you." And: "It's the truth."

As though Lancia ever had cause to doubt, as though he had expressed some uncertainty, but he never has, though he looks at Mukuro with mixed faces. Mukuro has realized he unnerves the man, but Lancia never scorns his questions. That's what's important.

Mukuro does trust him. He does.

It's a shame that, one day, his senpai will probably hate him.

Now, Lancia holds him. Still a little loose. As though he's afraid Mukuro will drool on him like an infant. As though he isn't quite certain how to grip someone so small, so thin.

"Thank you."

"You'll go to school in the fall." A new topic of conversation, then. "More children, there. You'll make friends. Not just -- men like me." Men who don't know what to do with you. Implied. Unsaid. "Other boys your age. And even girls." Twitching, awkward smile. "What do you think of them? Girls?"

Mukuro taps his chin. "They smell nicer."

"Sugar and spice and everything nice?"

"Snips and snails," Mukuro replies, though it sounds wrong in his mouth. He rolls his tongue. Licks the inside of his cheek. He plays along too well, and this is the problem. A child, he knows, shouldn't have adequate comebacks, and shouldn't have memorized the lines to recite with such fluidity. There should be more stumbling.

He's been working on that with the others, but with Lancia, it's too easy -- the back and forth. It's too easy to fall into that glide of conversation. Trespass childhood and normalcy.

"Do you really believe in God, senpai?"

"Of course," Lancia answers (so fast, it seems automatic; it always seems automatic).

"And the devil?"

"He can be overcome."

"And love and hate?"

"Those aren't things to believe in," Lancia says, though he hesitates. "They just are."

"Ken peed on the bed last night."

Lancia sighs. Mukuro loves the sound.

That night, after dinner has been served, after Mukuro's stomach is full, Lancia sits on the over-stuffed sofa, knuckles against his temple, head propped to the side, as he reads a book. Mukuro, without asking for invitation, seats himself in the man's lap. Glances at the text. It is, Mukuro sees, an autobiography of a man who was arrested for crimes committed on behalf of the mafia. The prose is dry. Somehow masculine, male.

"I want to read something, too," Mukuro says, and he lifts himself up off his senpai's knee. Selects a book, and reads:

>  _"Like you, I sought the kind of solitude that liberates, and I wept over secret, indefinable disappointments._   
> 
> 
> _Like you, I found the ways of the world absurd. Like you, I hated school, because the dogma clipped the wings of my imagination._
> 
>  _Like you, I loved flowers, books, music, worms, the sky and stars, the sea, the sun, trees, snow and the faithful claire de lune…benevolent confidants of my secret life."_
> 
>  __

Looks down the page.

>  _"Like you, I had a double life, a mysterious, burning and secret life; I spent hours of ecstasy in a world of dreams where all was just, beautiful and sweet."_

Lancia's brows knit. In one motion, he abdicates the book from Mukuro's hands, regarding the author severely; some hushed secret.

"A troubled man," he says, all unambiguous condemnation, and no hint of forgiveness or uncertainty.

"Did I do well? Saying the words?"

A stilted moment. "I didn't know you knew the language."

 _Oh,_ Mukuro thinks. _I don't. Not really. I only saw it in the maid's mind. I've been practising on her, a little._ It isn't his best work. He could apologize, but Lancia doesn't know any better. He's really been wanting to nick the old man, but wariness has its costs and preventions.

"Your reading level... it's well beyond most people your age."

"Is it? It isn't really, is it?" Mukuro takes the book again, fingers the pages -- feeling the words, the elevation. "But they're only words. I'm only saying them."

And he doesn't know them, really. He only felt them from the people he's been inside of. Is that really knowing? Is that really all there is to it? _It's nothing but a rehearsal, senpai._

"You'll do well in school." Gruff, somehow uneasy. Mukuro makes him uneasy, he knows. His senpai likes him, but Mukuro makes him uncomfortable, too. It's funny to watch. "High marks. I know it."

"What did he do?" Pointing. "The man. The one who wrote these... pretty things."

"Nothing you should hear about. Nothing you need to know."

Lancia puts his own book away, and sighs, and Mukuro loves the sound. He takes his hand. Bends the fingers playfully; traces lines with eyes and sight, like a teller of fortunes. Lancia's fingers are much larger than his own, much harder. Mukuro thinks each finger of Lancia's is as long as two of his.

He wants to put them inside of his mouth. He wants to bite off the rings, with their insignia of the _Famiglia_. Imprisoning metal pieces. Mukuro would break those off and chew.

He would see how far down his throat they might go without causing him pain.

It's an odd thought, and he dismisses it.

Mukuro abandons the book to the coffee table. Hugs his knees. "It's not like you not to tell me."

You told me about your crimes, so intimate as to have informed me you killed a man, and the mafia, even, and -- Mukuro wants to argue, but sits still, head lolling.

"I'm going to play cards with the men tonight."

"I want to listen to music." Mukuro puts his arms around Lancia's neck. A loose grip. Hangs his own head.

"I'll leave the radio on," Lancia offers.

The old man's taste runs toward classical music.

The sounds of violin bows on strings tickle Mukuro's skin, his inner ears.

Tchaikovsky's _None But the Lonely Heart_ , rendered with piano and with the shivering, somber wail of strings, captured in a female contralto, but Mukuro's attention focuses on the instruments.

The violin, with its sharp, knife-like beauty, its cutting precision of air -- the violin is sonorous perfection, torturous motions, crystal-bright, painful, somehow, in its clarity.

Deep into the night, Mukuro listens to these strings, and to the ivory keys of concert pianists.

Lancia is playing cards, somewhere, in a smoke-filled room.

Mukuro bundles himself tightly about with pillows and with blankets, dragged from the beds upstairs.

Ken and Chikusa do not trouble him. They understand what no one does.

Mukuro waits -- trance-like amid the music, but never sleeping -- and watches the sun rise above the hills of Italy.

~*~

  


In the morning, the old man clutches his heart when he finds the body of the maid floating face down in the swimming pool, beyond the glass doors at the back of the villa.

Mukuro's eyes have only just drifted closed, himself drowning in a sea of covers, when he hears the old man gasping, wheezing, crying out, "Call the police!"

The police debate whether her death was a suicide or an accident.

Half a bottle of Vicodin, half a bottle of Tokay, and a trip to the pool.

An obvious suicide, though the detail of the pool -- why?

A final swim. Perhaps.

~*~

"It's funny that he acted surprised," Mukuro tells Ken and Chikusa. He sits on the edge of the bed, looking out the window, at the way the trees sway in the vineyard. "He's had people killed, don't you think? But. Still, so surprised. Humans really are funny."

Chikusa pushes his glasses up. "It was risky, Mukuro-sama."

But the tone is not reproachful. It's maybe even a little admiring.

"That's right. But I had to test it at some point."

"You're -- " Chikusa hesitates. Mukuro touches his face, feels inside of him. A gentle smile, the gentlest.

"You believe I'm getting bolder?" The boys pile up with him, in the high light and the noon shadows, amid the blankets. Mukuro smiles, like one who has all the answers. "Of course. Remember. Both of you remember what I said -- about erasing it all. Did you think I had forgotten?"

They shake their heads, mutter: _of course not, Mukuro-san/sama._

There is a lie in the truth.

Mukuro feels, lately more than ever, confined.

If he has been bold, it is a boldness of desperation.

But he does not tell this to Chikusa and to Ken. He will not.

Mukuro takes their hands, one in each of his, so that he is grasping them both, and his smile is easier, now. Untroubled, for the present.

You see. You see. I haven't forgotten about us. It's a hero's journey, and this is hell. Hell is all around us. This big house, these men, the vineyards and everything. It's all tempting us to grow idle and to forget about why we came here. But I remember. I remember. I'll be the moral superior. Supreme being. God. Whatever it's called. Don't leave me. Have faith.

"Hey, Mukuro-san," Ken grunts. Scratches his ear. "That's not what they're gonna try to give me, right? What you took her out with?"

"Hm." Mukuro considers. "No, I don't think so. It was for pain, I believe."

Chikusa curls his lip.

"Hah!" Ken goes on. "Why do they need that for? Guess they're kinda flimsy."

"Yes, it would seem so." Mukuro yawns. Curls up, on his side, and prepares to sleep at last, though it is midday. "But never mind. She's not in pain. Not now. Let's talk about something else. What about school? Won't it be fun, do you think?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ the book Mukuro quotes from is by Joaquin Nin: http://www.skybluepress.com/cafe-in-space-the-anais-nin-6/


	10. the images they sell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ uh, warnings for relatively young-ish boys messing around -- in non-graphic ways !! +___+ Kokuyo permutations will begin here... (but certainly won't end here, hurr hurr)

> .oxo. 10

And then, three years.

Rokudo Mukuro, ten, lives beneath the sheltering, withering shadow of the cross at his English boarding school for Catholic boys; cross-legged sitting on the tall wooden chair, its impossibly straight back against the ridges of his spine, in the golden honey afternoons of the early fall, and outside, the tree branches sway, their own shadows stretching like whispering mouths. The trees are different in this part of England, where the climate inclines towards wet chill, and only during the summers does Mukuro return to Taormina, to ruination and warmth and the pretty taint of the Mediterranean arcs -- the Mediterranean air. The pond is bereft of geese, the fowl having already flown south for the upcoming winter, and the waters are still, and in the yards, the boys practice soccer in rows.

Mukuro reads _Paradise Lost_ , occasionally aloud to the other boys, occasionally when a particular passage strikes his fancy.

"Contrive who need, or when they need, not now," he reads, musing upon Satan's plight, musing upon the nature of resistance. "-- but we must contrive, mustn't we?"

Ken scowls down at the soccer players. During that first year, they all but tranquilized him, until he was so stoned upon their medicine that he could do little else but sit and stare, blank, during classes. But his body processed it in due time, as Mukuro knew it would.

Recently, he's been getting into fights. Kicking and biting.

Mukuro lately entered the vice principal's body and read the disciplinary report. Ken will be sent home, next semester, should this continue.

But, ah, there will be no need of that, if all goes as planned.

"I'm sorry it's taken so long," Mukuro tells them both, though his voice smiles, and he is still staring with intensity at the page. "You know that I felt it was necessary."

Mukuro, ten years old, has the highest marks of the boys in his grade level.

He is the president of the student council and the photography club (though he steadfastly declines to have his own picture taken).

Moreover, he fares well in chess competitions and the debate team.

Each fact of this has allowed him the sufficient nearness to enter new bodies, new minds.

And, _oh,_ the emotions Mukuro has felt vicariously: nervousness over the following day's exams, curiosity about the all girls' school a few blocks down (eagerness, as well, to sneak over there during a ripe moment), excitement about the upcoming sports games, frustration with regards to bullying, to popularity, sadness that Mommy and Daddy are fighting. Confusion, always. The boys are all confused. Lost, somehow.

He could lead them, but he hasn't the time.

His priority has been unlocking the dean of the grammar school.

~*~

A cut with the trident, you see, is not the only possession strategy.

During one summer with Lancia, during a lake outing, when they are alone and Lancia has been drinking, Mukuro nestles against him, presses his mouth to his drowsy ear as if to whisper, and in another instant, Mukuro feels it, for the first time: the dragging heaviness of inebriation.

A different sensation to the world, a different perception to the stars above, and a busy mind. Busy with work, but entertaining thoughts of play.

A robust mind, slightly guilt-tinged from past endeavors, but mostly -- Mukuro finds-- mostly content in that foreign, preoccupied adult manner.

( Even Mukuro had been startled.

Had abruptly pulled back, as though his hand had just descended upon the eye of a stove. )

Lancia sobers, stares at Mukuro as if in a daze, and then promptly laughs like the fool of the world.

"You looked spooked, senpai," Mukuro says, easing aside his own alarm.

"I felt like God was speaking to me, for just a moment . . . " He shakes his head. Digs a fingertip within his ear; crude, in the way Lancia always is. Somehow not entirely inelegant, for all that. "It's nothing, I think. Nothing, Mukuro. Your senpai is only -- "

Sweeping wave of the hands. Immense gestures, reflected on the water below, broken by the ripples of moonlight on the slow surface.

Mukuro sits on a chair on the ship's deck, legs outstretched, deferentially pigeon-toed, aping (as always) what he believes others expect to see.

"-- drunk," Mukuro finishes, a sighing breath. "Ah. It looks fun."

But of questionable fun for Mukuro, who is prone to becoming an object to be thrown happily into the air and swung about in circles -- one of Lancia's hands gripping his leg and the other gripping his arm -- when Lancia is in these spirits. And there are times when Lancia ignores him altogether, times when he goes out with the other men, and with their women, and Mukuro squirms in inchoate displeasure.

Since that night, since the night those years ago when the maid had the accident in the pool, worry has made Lancia eager, has driven him home at 8:30 am to prepare grilled cheese sandwiches for Mukuro, who eats them with bright, grateful eyes, as he sits with Ken and Chikusa, watching weekend cartoons on the television.

"It's wonderful to have the sounds of children in this house again," the old man says one day, wistful. "It's been so long."

Is that why you forgave me?

Mukuro does not ask.

( Maybe, probably, they are truly this ignorant. )

"You never give me coffee," Mukuro complains. Mock-frowns. Pouts. A routine.

"You'll have coffee when you're twelve or thirteen," Lancia retorts. "It's something to look forward to."

"I could handle it," Mukuro insists. Unlike Ken, who would climb up the trees outside and eat the sparrows, if provided half a cup.

But it is not customary to give children coffee in this household. Coffee is the domain of a man, not a boy child.

Mukuro could steal it easily enough, but he abstains, taking instead milk in a thermos during dormitory study sessions, iced lemonade in mid-summer, and Lancia's home-made tea during moments of generic uneasiness -- although, since living in England, Mukuro has realized that, true to stereotype, Italians really are rubbish when it comes to this brew.

But Lancia is reasonably proud, so Mukuro only smiles and prepares his Earl Grey orange rinds and sugar cubes, neglecting to inform Lancia that his concoction tastes like watery dreck.

"It's good, isn't it?" Lancia asks, and elbows him. Gently, spontaneously.

Nudges Mukuro down, puts him in a grappling head-lock, knuckles the tuft in back until it's even more unruly than usual. Until Mukuro's smile is shaky, put upon, and he realizes, in a peak of eventuality, that he is maybe almost happy. Here, like this.

The wrinkle of anxiety between the two of them has been smoothed down since Mukuro has been away at boarding school during the fall and during the spring.

With sufficient breathing space, Lancia is friendlier towards him. More jovial. Their conversations hold less weighted, drowning moments. Easy undercurrents of laughter, buoyant -- warm.

The adults drink coffee in the dining room, crinkling the morning papers in their large hands.

"Stocks are up." -- a passing comment. At another time:

"-- the way she was looking at you last night -- "

"a real fine gal" and "into you, man"

\-- fragments, always.

Eggs sizzle in water. Lancia takes two, poached, on toast, alongside sausages.

Mukuro studies his face for a moment.

Watches him laugh with the exuberance of one who has escaped from the nightmare.

When the new maid runs Ken upstairs to take a bath -- a feat she is capable of only with Mukuro's silent nod in his direction -- Mukuro takes the remote control and changes the station from cartoons to news programs.

A man shot his wife today. Probably. Claims it was someone else. Close-up shot of the prosecuting attorney, his bulging eyes.

And here, the accused, with salt and pepper hair.

Mukuro puts a hand to his chin. _I could bury myself into you so fully and know the truth._

Every day, Mukuro watches documentaries about unsolved mysteries, criminal profiles, sensational court shows, and always the news, which is full of natural disasters, child killing, wife killing, husband maiming, animal cruelty.

It's as I thought. It's as I thought. This world isn't worth much, is it?

Mukuro seeks to glean a higher meaning. If there is one, if the news of humankind can be believed, it's that there isn't anything to look forward to. There's nothing but degradation, storms on the horizon, the end of days. Hatred. Better to erase them all, now.

In the dining room, Lancia is laughing at something that is not Mukuro.

Mukuro's eye glints, and in another instant, he is elsewhere, peals of laughter bubbling from his throat, and taking his first long drink of hot coffee.

~*~  


Mukuro reads trashy spy genre fiction, in his spare time, and muses that he would be the best interrogator in the world.

"I've no need of questions," he tells Chikusa. No need of questions, no need of dimly lit rooms to toy with the subject's mind, no need of crude instruments.

They were rearing him for this, maybe; rearing him to be a tool which could slide beneath the skin and pry out secrets, but Mukuro would sooner bite off his own tongue, fill his mouth with his blood and drown, than tell anyone what he has learned in hell.

"You've seemed happier, lately," Chikusa says one day, the words in his mouth like the subtlest of accusations, though they are not and will never be.

"It's so lovely and warm in Italy," Mukuro confides. "I've been very content."

It's a winking sort of smile this time, saying everything and saying nothing. Chikusa accompanies him in silence to the bushy, tree-heavy land in the far back of the school, which once could have been called a forest, but which has been cut in swaths, now, and the trees are fallen over.

Mukuro throws his bags on a log and says again how happy he has been.

"So -- you're going through with it, still," Chikusa says.

It would be a question, were he another person.

"Of course," Mukuro answers without hesitation.

His laughter rings in the trees, scattering birds.

"In spite of your happiness."

"And because of that," Mukuro affirms.

Parcel the grains of sand in the world and find the kernel of truth. It isn't in happiness. You know this. Idleness is temptation from our true path. A fleeting good feeling. It's only an illusion. A grilled cheese sandwich in paradise -- you know, a new spin on a cliche, at best.

Lancia holds my hand, takes me with him on vacations, prepares my food and censors me from horror films (amusing, charming, dearest senpai); what would I do? Relinquish my powers? And live as his son, or his little brother?

"I would fall prey to my own illusion."

The greatest failing of his kind.

"You know," Mukuro continues, "I really didn't think much of the taste."

"Coffee."

(Chikusa: Interrogative-declarative, always.)

"Far too bitter." And now Mukuro is the one confessing a deep and private secret. "I hated it."

But he is already eager for another mug of the substance.

Mukuro crafts the trident into reality from the spine of his nightmare art, tosses it in weightless rhythm, a shift from one hand to two, and whistles for Ken.

He alters the kanji in his eye. Splays one hand about the cool indigo glow of asura.

Ken inserts his teeth. Chikusa rolls his yo-yo strings.

Mukuro spars with them for three hours of precious spare time, an allowance he makes once a week, twice if he's feeling generous, if he can relinquish the minutes.

They sweat. Mukuro does not.

Chikusa most often trudges back to the dormitory for a shower. Ken sometimes rolls about in the dirt. Says it eases the feel of the sweat, by some logic. A sand bath.

"Gum, Mukuro-san?" Ken offers today, and Mukuro takes it and chews and blows bubbles between his smiling lips.

Ken likes fruit gum. Likes to chew it, then eat it, even though Chikusa has told him countless times that this isn't what gum is for. Mukuro does not mind. It's the closest to fruit that Ken's dietary ingestion is likely to consist of, sad though that may be.

( Mukuro is older now. Knows his age by the way he forgives the pineapple-apple flavour, the fact that the brand is named _Trident_ .)

"I can't get a good bubble with this," Mukuro admits, although he could make fantastic shapes from reality, if he desired.

But he blows futile, sad puffs that break against his lips, dissolving the flavour in back of his mouth.

"I should leave soon," Chikusa says, after they've sat in silence in the woods. "Mukuro-sama. There is an exam tomorrow."

Mukuro chews his gum, mouth politely closed.

Exams pose him no difficulty.

Take a body which has the answers. A genius student's body. A teacher's body.

Someone always knows, and everyone knows something. Something of use. Mukuro reads extra material in his spare time. And he takes in everything, from everywhere.

There is a debate occurring for how best to deal with him, you know.

In technicality, he has been advanced three grade levels already, and on the side, he writes collegiate essays with a private tutor.

( The tutor, amazed with Mukuro, has already given him far more learning than he realizes he has. )

"I'm bored of answers," Mukuro tells Ken and Chikusa, and slumps his shoulders a little. "Knowledge is a stream. I enter. It feels too simple, sometimes. I'm tired of school."

He is ten going on twenty-two, academically.

"Yeah. At least you have the uniforms, though. Right, Mukuro-san?"

Mukuro laughs, dry. "Yes, I suppose there is that, Ken."

No fact for an exam or a phrase adequate for a paper is beyond his feasible grasp.

And he's been to hell.

"I don't believe in heaven."

Buddha reached enlightenment when he acknowledged that suffering exists and that detachment from desire gives cessation to suffering.

Mukuro rolls that idea around in his mind.

"Then I don't know what heaven is -- but from how they make it sound, it's a beautiful place, don't you think? A place that you grow attached to." He feels himself verging upon an epiphany. "So heaven -- the way they teach of heaven in a school like this -- is no solution for us, I fear."

Samsara forces living beings to make their way through tedious lives, but Mukuro has already suffered too many deaths.

Buddha begged for alms, at first. Mukuro remembers three scrawny children, newly re-entering unto civilization. Remembers sacrificing himself and them. Four years ago, now, or almost.

For protection and a roof and food. For information. Secrets. Possibilities.

Maybe, he thinks, desire has not abandoned him.

The others have places they need to be, in a sense (like hell will Ken ever study), but Mukuro's agitation presses them nearer -- creatures before a storm, only they seek to give shelter rather than find it.

"But I love the statues. Blood everywhere, and a naked man with cloth dangling at his hips."

Mukuro says it almost facetiously, and the air lightens, and Chikusa shifts, and Mukuro grips his wrist. Grips Ken's, and looks one in the eyes, and then the other. He eases them down, so they're sitting with him on the fallen, slanted log.

Chikusa's hands grasp and unclench empty air in his own unique agitation.

"Not idle enough to be the devil's tools, I suppose," Mukuro teases.

He knows where those hands have been. What they do at night -- Chikusa's hands and Ken's teeth, when they believe Mukuro is sleeping.

But this is fallacy. Mukuro's slumber is the most erratic, the most shallow. He sleeps like one who expects to wake to find himself being murdered.

 _I have read,_ he could tell them, _about a thousand acts of intimacy._

( Though mostly between men and women. But he knows boys can also do this. )

Dry textual amorousness. Call it love. Call it fucking. Call it high literature or dime store romance. But Mukuro's heard the gossip, the rumours. He's been hearing about it since the adults re-acquainted him with their world, in one form or another. Censored, somehow, when they think he's listening, but he's too fast for evasion.

"Kiss me," Mukuro says.

They hesitate, stunned in the beginning by his untouchable aura of fragility.

And then it's like anything else. Like walking and fishing and bathing together.

Mukuro blooms lotuses in the academy's pond, for no other reason than he likes the look.

Afterwards, the three of them return, stubbornly quiet, to the dormitory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ pineapple-flavoured Trident gum is legit --
> 
> http://www.chillfans.com/Portals/11536/images/Trident_Layers_applepineapple_20091028-resized-600.jpg


	11. i let it fall, my heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \-- language, again: yes, they're mostly technically speaking English b/c they're in England, but Mukuro is an Italian transfer student, and M.M. is a French transfer student, and the "-chan" etc. is to keep the spirit/tone of how she talks in the series, as with Ken and Mukuro-san, and I apologize if this is weird/confusing, as ever. LMAO I guess basically I'm asking a lot of language patience here. KHR CANON, in any translation, is a little bit odd about things like a bunch of Italian kids with Japanese names, tho, so...
> 
> \-- UNDERAGE NOT!PORN CONTINUES TO ENSUE from here on out +___+ please be aware!! (pretty non-graphic, but... still)

> .oxo. 11

It is by accident rather than design that Mukuro initially encounters the eventual third member of his entourage.

First:

~*~

One day, he takes it upon himself to possess a boy five years his senior, a secondary-level student in the academy who deigned to initiate a conversation with him in the pews after Sunday services -- a religious discourse, as it were, because this is one discussion the older boys are always game for, even with the younger -- and when Mukuro described hell, the boy said: "What an imagination you have, _kid_ , but knock it off with the Eastern shit, yeah?"

It's the wrong generation, he explained, calmly. It's not cool anymore. It's not the fad.

They tried it in the 20s, in the 50s, when they were seeking to revolutionize the world, modern and postmodern, and now we need something more postpostmodern than that, a theory and a drug to break down everything which has come before; you can't look to the cross, and you can't look to the East. No, man, we're due for a revolution.

And Mukuro says, "Yes, yes, we are. This world is."

The older boys are wonderful exercises in humanity.

This one thinks he's exchanging a favour, allowing Mukuro to follow him about the school premises that Sunday, after their initial talk, so when he stoops over a water fountain, Mukuro slides out the three-pronged fork of the trident, black staff not included in this conjuring, and pokes him on the back of the thigh.

Then he's inside the body, feeling the insect-sting bite of flesh pricked by metal.

"So this is it," he says with this mouth, now feeling the long, gawky limbs -- the hair in strange places, a little more than himself, and a little less than the full adults.

Stubble on the face that he touches with one hand. An athlete's pumping heart.

Other boys come, acquaintances and friends.

"Let's go, man. Let's go," they say.

The body's brain knows to where. The body's feet carry it.

And the mouth only smiles, smiles, smiles.

~*~

The all girls' school, boarding-style and as Catholic as the boys' version, lies three blocks down the road, conveniently within walking range, such that you are forced to wonder at the logic of separating them in the first place. It has never interested Mukuro overly. A human is a human, no matter the anatomy, and he has seen little evidence that females differ much in any interesting way.

For the other boys, it is a source of great, sweating exultation and curiosity.

This body had already, apparently, scheduled a venture in that direction with its friends (so the friends make known when they approach, all waves and back-slapping and other assorted homosocially male rituals). Refusing at this exact moment might prove inopportune, and, after all, _why not?_

Thus, Mukuro, via gawky teenager and its brute accomplices, goes.

~*~

Now:

Mukuro had some idea, you see (everyone does), of what a proper religious scholastic educational system for females would entail.

He briefly stole Lancia's magazines (or _Lancia's friends' magazines_ , as he would have you believe). He understands the most important feature of girl education lies in the perfect uniform. It's only a little strange that his own sex has not yet realized this, but no matter.

And if the pictures are accurate, said uniform universally consists of a checkered skirt ensemble with frilly, lacy knee socks and a white shirt tied at the breasts, leaving ample room for smooth cleavage and a bare abdomen, a hint of bra, glasses pushed down along the bridge of the nose, a haughty, come-hither look, and long, tan bodies -- suspiciously, perhaps, 20-something in appearance in the bulk of the aforesaid pictures, but this could be explained by dint of a firm adherence to piety and purity simply evolving a girl's anatomy at a younger age.

What he sees, then, when he approaches the academy is a disappointment.

Fair-skinned, fall-toned British girls, cast in grey by the overcast drizzle of the afternoon, many no taller than his true body. Black skirts, depressingly knee-length, or three fingers shorter, on coltish legs, downy backs of girlish knees, soft indents, some with little Band-Aids to mark shaving injuries. Elbows. Hair clips.

Side bangs. Messy bangs all around. And though there are older girls, there is scarcely a well-muscled thigh or a golden calf in sight. The smiles are awkward and a little lopsided. Not a single one invites with a burning gaze. Make-up is sparse. Most faces are pallid. Average. Lank flat blonde hair, or dark and curly. Or red, falling around a freckled face. No designer heels. No heels at all. Where are all the stilettos?

The shirts, finally, are loose, and plain white, and not tied with the corners pulled into the neck to expose the cleavage. Just worn simply, just hanging about, and there is, in fact, no cleavage; there are barely breasts in most cases, or at least the outlines are faint.

It's dull. Inside his shell, while the others around him wolf whistle, Mukuro is bored.

The glossy representations were boring as well, but at least they had suggested that women were special animals: more visually erotic, more untouchable. What else is the point, if they're merely a little grimy, a little imperfect, a little messy-haired and uncertain, and thus no different at all from his kind?

He is preparing to turn, to leave, to concoct an excuse if necessary, when one girl in a black beret catches his eye.

"Janine," she says, smiling as sweetly as Mukuro himself would, all exaggerated pronounciations ( _jah neen_ ), fingers tying invisible butterfly knots behind her back. "There you are. Walk with me."

It is the most insincere smile Mukuro has ever seen outside of a mirror.

He falls instantly in love.

~*~

M.M. wears her beret with a tilt to the right of her face, adjusting it periodically, so the slant of it gives her a side eyeing look, and her hip juts out in the matching direction, so that her kneecap protrudes, and above it, her skirt swishes about her upper legs, though her clothing stays mostly in place. Not so with the girl beside whom she walks, who keeps dropping to one knee to lift the sock that falls about her ankles. Janine, is it, with shorn black-hair, the ends split and frayed, bitten down fingernails, and a haunted, distracted face. She laughs nervously, unhappily; it's almost a braying laugh, even as it breaks down to rasped coughing.

M.M. laughs more rarely, but with no nervousness. She giggles, brief and feminine, a sound that goes from the throat to the open mouth and bounces back again somehow, quick as that.

She carries large red books, inches thick, the shiny envelopes long since removed so there is only stiff and spine, and her footsteps in her flat Mary Jane sandals, single-buckle as is the style, are quiet, rhythmic, somehow conveying a sense of ethereal music, piano keys on the sidewalk. Ivory taps and distant strings.

"So what about your homework?" she asks her companion.

"Oh, I -- I did it, yes," the girl stammers, and they sit down on the bench, for it is after all a lazy Sunday, post-church services, and they have nowhere better to be.

Bells ring out an admission of the hour.

Janine, _the companion,_ shuffles in her bag and removes a few sheets of lined loose leaf paper; her handwriting is anxiety-laden scrawl.

M.M. glances askew with sharp, mascara-tipped, eyeliner-shaded eyes. Crosses one leg over the other at the bench, holds the papers at an angle, and marks deft, sweeping corrections with a purple gel pen, dotting her i's with hearts, scribbling in the margins. "No, no," she declares. "This is all wrong. Take M.M.-chan's corrections and re-write it."

And the papers are now proferred in return to their original owner. An impish smile.

She smiles, Mukuro notes, with her eyebrows knit, like you smile at a fly before you swat it.

The other girl: "Thank you."

"Sure, sure. Of course. Just try to do better next time, okay?" Expansive shrug. Tip of the beret. "Honestly, you can do better than this. This is -- well, I'm just being honest, but it's pretty bad."

And Mukuro can hear the strands of old conversations, not repeated here, yet plain enough:

 _You can't blame me for being honest, you know. Just be thankful . . ._

"Now, fix it. Turn it in on Monday. I have to go." Arms crossed beneath her non-existent breasts. "I'm going shopping."

Janine, the companion, jerks like a kicked animal at the sound of the words, mutters a hushed _thanks_ , and when M.M. offers the assignment without another glance, without turning to face her directly, she accepts her work with a wan, lean smile. Her long, frayed fringe of bangs streaks like wild black lightning over her red-rimmed eyes. Her hollow smile lingers, an expression of compensation for her _friend's_ assistance.

Over-compensation, also, for her own confidence.

"I'll work on it. Of course. I'll -- I'll show you again."

 _You'll see._

As if she can believe that.

And when she slings the strap of the duffel bag over her shoulder, Mukuro witnesses the one significant detail which this girl, in her distressed haste, has failed to notice.

~*~

She _interests_ him.

When Mukuro first kisses M.M., in his borrowed body, he slips from her jacket pocket the wallet that she has stolen (without her friend's barest awareness) and holds it up between them, all self-satisfied smile, and she grins pixie-like through a blush, licks her lips, covers her mouth, and knees him in the stomach.

"Stalking a girl makes you an _asshole_ , you know."

"And petty theft?" Doubling over for half a second, Mukuro raises one hand in the air, idly tossing the twice-stolen wallet up and down, as the other hand touches his chin. "I'm _curious._ "

She sighs and rolls her eyes with a flair for drama (which quite neatly matches his own), and Mukuro adds, "Do you have a role in your school's thespian society? Lady Macbeth, is it?"

"Cut the shit. I don't care if you're older than me."

And when she is exasperated, the French accent -- sign of a transfer student -- sharpens, and she scrunches her little nose, and everything about her face grows tiny thorns, points of intensity.

Then, irritation appearing to abate, M.M. asks more slowly, in a more reasoned tone (a tone of bargaining):

"Well. Are you gonna report me?"

"Should I? But -- " When he tries to laugh, it is still broken by the recent abuse of his diaphragm. "-- I'm fond of theft, myself. This body, for instance."

And when she predictably does not believe him, Mukuro takes her aside, leads her to the forest behind the boy's school, and the original him emerges, gently, from beyond the trees. The other body sags. Drops to the forest floor, amid the ferns, unconscious.

"And he won't wake," Mukuro says, "until I decide that he should."

She glares, visually unimpressed, and puts the beret in her duffel bag. Tosses her hair.

"I thought you were a hot _beau_ , but it turns out you're just a little kid with silly bed hair." She digs in her bag, produces a comb -- three careful strokes across her own swept bangs, and then she tosses it in his direction. "Keep this. A _free_ gift from M.M.-chan. You won't get another."

"I'll be certain to cherish it. Thank you."

"I'm pretty sure that's illegal, what you did."

"Oh, _au contraire_ \-- to use your preferred tongue." He steps closer. "There are no laws in the books about possessing bodies. I've looked."

"Kidnapping. And kissing a little school girl?" She laughs, cold. Always cold. Beautifully icy. "You weren't supposed to be at my academy. Boys aren't allowed. Who are you, anyway?"

Mukuro makes an elaborate show of combing the zig-zag atop his hair until, somehow, it grows in immensity, springing newfound oppositional z's, cross-stitched, and when he begins on the tuft, M.M. is clenching her hands and huffing in disgust.

"You're doing it totally _backwards!_ I gave it to you to fix that!"

The tuft gradually doubles.

"Give me that back!" M.M. yells, and lunges at him, and his hand catches her open fist, and her knee goes for his leg, and he parries, and then they are on the ground, amid the underbrush, legs thrashing in the dirt, and happily, sloppily kissing; or, rather, Mukuro kisses her, his new toy -- lightly, at first, as if asking for permission, little licks to the cheeks, to the eyelids, as Ken has taught him, soliciting, and her face blooms in similar colour to her hair, eyelashes fluttering, mock coyly (or is this the truth?), and she opens her mouth and melds their tongues together; sweet and slow and eventually breathless.

"Stop," she gasps, after her shirt has been lifted, haphazardly tucked beneath her chin. "I've just met you. I don't even know your name! Or, for that matter -- "

Mukuro drops the cloth, drops his head in acquiescence, and presses his mouth to her navel, and he thinks he wants to crawl into her. Some would undoubtedly psychoanalyze his motherlessness, but her belly is only so warm and white.

"I don't date boys who aren't rich."

Feeble protest.

It had been no effort, in Mukuro's secondary, stolen body, to convince her to kiss him, and it had been no effort to convince her to come with him to this place where he likes to go, and it will be no effort to finish with her, now. For her body warms to the attention of others very quickly, he has found, and he knows the signs, and he knows the symptoms.

"I love you," he says, gently.

"Love is for idiots."

"Yes," he agrees. "It is."

"You don't love me at all. We just met. You're a liar."

"I am, of course. And so are you. I saw that from the first."

He is unmoving, face against her burning body, lips tasting the shivers.

"And that's why I decided to trust you this far," he admits, "because you lied and you manipulated, as I would. You can't turn me in, for your record is as poor as mine. You can't betray me to them, can you?"

And he reaches up, and cups her cheeks with gloved hands, and for a moment, he is within her, tasting the warm harness of her unspent breath. They are two children, eye to eye, and she speaks French beautifully and wears little hairclips with initials, and she is the first girl he has ever known, a perfect miniature of the Madonna; tiny M's. Macbeth (Lady), Madonna, Manipulation: who are you, really?

"Sounds like you're bribing me not to report you," she says, her tone carrying the mildest note of approval.

"Come with me."

"That's surprisingly honest, from you."

"You'll never know, unless you follow me."

He kisses her ear, her cheek.

M.M. embraces him, strokes the back of his hair, and succumbs, finally, without words. Her hands grasp his shoulders, and she presses her mouth to his forehead, then his ear, mimicking, and breathes:

"So, tell me already. What's your name?"

\-- thus he reaches inside of her bag and writes, on her exposed belly, in cursive (purple gel-pen ink with hearts for i's, and a handwriting with which she should be all too familiar, as Mukuro felt it out with gentle care when he held her hand from inside its innermost joints):

 

ROKUDO MUKURO

六道

 

M.M. looks down, eyeing those words critically, deciphering from her awkward angle.

"Well, okay." With all the emphasis of one who has been taking Japanese since she first began attending school: " _Mukuro-chan._ Where are we going, then? Japan?"

He sinks with her, and she props an elbow over his head, over the part she has found so objectionable.

"No. Not yet. How predictable."

"Where, then?"

He laughs, easy as that, and slides her stolen wallet beneath her skirt, tucking the edge inside of her, like a secret.

"Where we know we're going to go, my dear." Mukuro pulls down her shirt. And M.M. takes back "her" wallet and her pen, and watches him sweetly, like one mesmerized, now (his charmingly insincere creature), and Mukuro says, through another kiss, "Hell. Only hell."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> relational notes:
> 
> \-- this is "in love" in the way most kids who fall in love at first sight are "in love". That is to say, infatuated in a kind of stupid way, and I meant it ironically, sort of, but idk how well that translates, with him being the most unreliable narrator ever and all... although I guess me saying this undermines the point a bit, ahhh...
> 
> \-- uhhh, I ACTUALLY INTEND TO GO SOMEWHERE with all these relationships. I know it looks like I keep taking a billion detours, but all this is building towards something. I just have had to write him collecting all his Mukuro-gang hos along the way. and I know M.M. is disliked by a lot of people, but the way I figure it, anyone who is in that gang is at least a little close to Mukuro (although I guess canon could always disabuse me of that notion down the road, and his past relationship w/M.M. is pretty mysterious, so I might get rickrolled for real, but... I tend to think Mukuro is sort of tight with ALL of his followers, for all that he pretends to others that he gives no fucks about anyone but himself ?_? )


	12. said their nevers they slept their dream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slightly (barely) more graphic mentions of sexual things here.

> .oxo. 12

Look the leaves are dead  
The moments gone, there's no surrender  
Forever now unsaid  
The words that might have warmed December  
It's all inside your head  
Like fragments of a dream you remember  
So never mind, your clever mind, never mind me

\-- "Clevermind," Poets of the Fall

The first time Mukuro kissed Ken, his mouth had tasted of fruit gum.

And this time when Mukuro kisses Ken, having previously contracted himself to do so should Ken deign to bathe (which he did, thus confirming Mukuro’s belief in the solicitous need of humans for affection, even amongst his own comrades), Mukuro smiles through his uncomplicated manipulation, even offering his tongue, until he presently grows aware of the fact that it has become inconveniently trapped within his companion’s current insert of teeth.

Then, Mukuro splays a hand on Ken’s chest and pushes at him until they separate, lips and tongue flecked bloody, with the set of teeth _splicking_ egregiously to the ground of the dormitory, at which point Chikusa murmurs, “Troublesome.”

And M.M., having walked into the room from the adjacent shower, wearing nothing but a towel about the body and a towel in the hair, declares, “I can’t believe you used my fucking shampoo!” before taking one look at the teeth, one look at Ken merrily lapping spittle and blood off Mukuro’s face, and adds, “Ew. Why are boys so gross.”

Ken curls at Mukuro’s feet and does not turn to face the newest addition to their gang. Chikusa exhales audibly.

They sulk in the manner unique to those whose mental dictionaries have no precise entry for the entity that most in the more socialized world would recognize as the female companion of a closest friend and leader (nor, indeed, do they have any frame of reference for females in any capacity).

Their evasive eyes indicate that M.M. may as well be an alien creature -- high-voiced, sweet-smelling, shimmering with tiny golden clips; she wears delicate, lacy attire which Ken and Chikusa, accustomed to roughness and rags, cannot conceive of as _clothing_ , and shoes which Ken cannot imagine being attached to any body part.

Moreover: shoes with which she has already beaten over his shoulders when he investigated by way of chewing the pointed ends off.

“Now, now,” Mukuro says, always the one with all the answers, as he wipes the blood – holding up a red-smeared hand, “I’m rather fond of that substance, myself, though perhaps in a different capacity. Come. Sit with us.”

She hesitates, at first, but eventually steps lightly over the improbably carpeted floor of the private boys’ academy dorm. Sits on the bed, with Mukuro, and eyes Ken. “I still can’t believe this fucker thinks it’s okay to use my shampoo without permission.”

“But it’s for a good cause, you see,” Mukuro replies. “Generosity is a virtue. Or so I am told.”

M.M’s eyes narrow and her lips curve upwards to form the scornful, contemptuous expression with which she regards most of her fellow human beings, and Mukuro feels a faint flutter of elation at that _look_ , particularly when she delicately lifts a white arm to embrace him around the neck, leaning warmly, as she says, “Yo. I’m shipping out the thing I told you about before. I can’t _wait_ to make some real music with you, Mukuro-chan.”

Being in love, Mukuro has decided – or at least jointly unified in their mutual sense of superiority over the remainder of the human race, which is near enough to love, he supposes – is a wonderful feeling.

“Play for my senpai,” Mukuro says, and gathers the other three around him. “He does so love a good instrumental.” A laugh. “And we’re going there this winter.”

M.M. turns to face him; smiling as if in a dream, and Mukuro adds, “Home.”

~*~

The dean of students is fucking his secretary.

This Mukuro discovers when he possesses the latter in his final dash to gain the requisite closeness needed to take the former, and even though he has lately been coming into a comprehension of the mechanics of human coitus, there is something rather jarring about being bitten and shoved against a wall, suffering the grunting adult version of the mating attraction (and if it is a lesson by proxy, then Mukuro is certain he himself is much more attractively subtle with his own affairs), and he says, through her lips, “Oh, my. Isn’t this a little fast?”

And rather a cliché, at that. But he-as-she laughs, and the man says, “That’s not what you said last night.” (Which a scan of the mind confirms for the truth, actually.)

This earns a shuddering response, though not from pleasure, as the mating companion might believe, and Mukuro, in close quarters, a meeting of lips and teeth, snakes a hand behind the man and cuts, unseen, and then lets the female body drop to the floor in a black sweeping tide of unconsciousness. He is now the dean.

How wonderfully strange are humans, he thinks, and discreetly removes a set of keys from the body’s vest pocket.

Memories that are not Mukuro’s own guide his mind, so that he knows which of the keys is the one he seeks. He thumbs the ridges of its cool, shiny surface.

How wonderfully strange are humans, and how wonderfully strange are official humans.

Bureaucratic humans.

So preoccupied with sheets of paper declaring themselves worthy, so preoccupied with office props, plaques and prestige.

None of this will matter when you die, of course.

You take nothing with you into the next cycle. Not even your mind.

He could tell them that, but they would never listen.

Simply wrenching open the grey filing cabinet in his original body would have been easy enough, but the violence of the disturbance would have drawn unnecessary attention, so Mukuro slips the key into the cabinet lock, turns once, twice, and comes away with four sets of manila folders, even as he shoves the cabinet door closed with a resonant clattering (fortunate, indeed, that the hour is late, and none are within hearing distance).

And there it is.

His own file, arrayed with cryptic numbers, strange symbols -- his own file, stamped shut with sealing wax, pressed-white, peeling off at the push of his thumb, and full, no doubt, of lies.

~*~

Mukuro sits on the bed. Sways his feet and watches the first winding ribbons of starlight on the frost.

The skies in England are grey this time of year, during the day. The sunlight falters and gives way above the clock towers.

"Every cloud has a silver lining, they say." Mukuro allows his three companions to close in around him. Presses his chin to the crown of Ken's head, inhaling a whiff of _L'Oréal_ \-- uncharacteristic, an overlay above the faint animal odor (musky but presently not too insufferable), and adds, "Though I wonder if this is not simply another way of noting that there is no blue in the sky."

With the silver and the white and the grey, no space remains for the blue, and Mukuro could, if he wished, tell them of a dream he had long ago, and of a place where he used to walk -- a world with a sky such as this, before Mukuro had ever seen the sky, in a time when he knew of it only from flat screens, projected images; and this before he had learned to take those images inside of himself, then pull them out, pull them from his mind and vomit them back down the throats of his adversaries like so much acidic bile.

Mukuro could tell the other three of this, could take them to that old dreamland and kiss them, each, beneath the grey sky, a ring of linked fingers and linked bodies, but he does not. He does not, and he will not.

"What are you thinking of, Mukuro-sama?" Chikusa asks.

And Mukuro lies, question-answers: "What Christmas gift shall I buy for my senpai?"

"I hope he buys _you_ something nice," M.M. opines, giggling. "I'm altruistic like that, yanno."

"Perhaps -- " and Mukuro's smile lengthens, "-- I'll see to it that he does."

~*~

You realize, of course, that the French girl is not supposed to be present within this space.

It is male space, a school for boys only, segregated accordingly, but the truth is, at Mukuro's invitation, M.M. scaled the outer walls, bags in tow, made her way up the trellis, with Mukuro looking down from the dormitory window (an accidental but precise reversal of the classic trope of romance, Juliet upon her balcony), and with a minimum of grunting frustration and several convenient glimpses of her white panties as her skirt slid up against the pressures of the brick wall, she made her way up the overhangings and into his room, fell in a heap, and dusted a hand along her scraped knees, exhaling loudly, an exclamation of, "Make a girl some tea, would ya?"

Mukuro, if the truth were told, momentarily forgets everything besides the desire for another flash of the white cloth under her skirt. It was nothing he ever used to wonder about: only a silly portion of fabric, a material his own abilities could easily replicate without trouble, and he knows this, but as of the last year, it's become an intensely fascinating object of mental perusal (more so, somehow, than in past times), though he isn't so simple as to be distracted by such silly human follies.

(And then M.M. says, " _Tea_ , Mukuro-chan!" -- with her head tilted as though speaking to someone who is staring off into space and pointedly ignoring the words of his companion.)

They spend the next hour on the floor, with her back to the bed (her in knee socks, him touching her thighs), their intense kissing session broken by mutual intermittent whisperings of sweet, harmonious nothings concerning the topics of eternal damnation and hellfire, reincarnation, and the culmination of the destruction of the mafia, for which M.M. swears (with hyper-sincere wide eyes) that she will assist in the removal of -- anything for the man she cares about (who a week ago was a boy with atrocious bedhead, but such is the transformative power of love, and _also, exactly how much does your famiglia have in the bank account, Mukuro-chan? because I am just wondering,_ she says).

Caught in the grand sweeping mood which seems to accompany certain adolescent tidal waves of hormones, he answers, "Enough for us all, of course, and should we find ourselves lacking, isn't there a term – yes, I remember. Identity theft?"

"I can pull that off," she replies.

"As can I." (Though he thinks they may have a different meaning, but it is sufficiently alike, this romantic dream.)

He devotes his accumulated spare time to removing the panties which held captive his interest, inserting coins and fingers into her, then pulling them out, wondering at her strangeness, that she lets him, that she slouches and yawns, spread open, with one hand to her knee, asking, "Do you smoke, by the way?" and just allowing him to explore, and he says no; cigarettes smell bad, honestly -- and she says she likes cloves and why would he want to do a silly thing like stick her with a euro, because really, if you're going to put a foreign object in _there_ , it ought to be a phallic fruit of some kind, and the girls in her school, some of them like to try with carrots and cucumbers.

"Well," she says, after suffering his curiosity for a while in this manner. "Take off your pants and let me have a turn."

~*~

How many classes must she have skipped to be with them, Mukuro wonders.

Eventually, the girl breaks the window. Shatters it with the end of an instrument casing and climbs in, deftly, carefully stepping over the shards. Ken and Chikusa curl their lips in aggravation at her intruding presence, though they cannot openly object to that which Mukuro tolerates. A clandestine war of passive aggression ensues, known to Mukuro, who suggests the alleviation of such frustrations in the form of a communal sleeping together (and even he is uncertain of whether he means this as a euphemism).

All three of them, somewhat to his surprise, reply with gapes of varying severity.

"But she's -- " Ken searches. " -- _her_."

"And he smells weird," M.M. says, pointing at the accused. "And what kind of bestiality do you think I go for, anyway? Just because I'm from Paris and the sex there is a _little_ more varied than in your stupid Italy -- "

"You dumb bitch -- "

"Nuh uh. I'm _not_ your bitch. I won't ever be!"

Chikusa mutters something and grunt-sighs. Mukuro motions for them all to settle down.

"The bed is mine," he observes, simply, with a placid smile. "Come into it with me if you wish. I won't say no to you. To any of you."

Consider it a gift, he might add. A gift for your loyalty. Your blind, childish faith (which he is benevolent enough to reward). Your recompense. I take good care of my tools, my toys, my pets; of that which is mine, which is all of you, now. Mukuro holds up his hands. His eyes still smile, half-lidded, and he reaches over to the little nightstand and flicks the switch of the lamp, casting the room in dark shadows, and outside, the night air is white with winter, a promise of snow, with the frost weighing down the blades of grass. A million tiny knives that might break against his fingertips.

The broken window lets in the cold, and Mukuro could cover it with any number of worldly substances, with insulating materials of the common variety, but instead, he shields their enclosed haunt with something from a dream, something for which there is no name, an illusory sliver of matter -- and when he walks soundlessly to the window, walks soundlessly back to the bed, the other three have begun to navigate to this place with him, beneath the covers.

They move as if in spite of themselves, and they tolerate one another, because each wants to be in the company of Mukuro, and to reject one another in the warm presence of his covers would be to reject _him_ , which is unacceptable.

He does not tell them about the old dream. Does not tell them what he saw in his file when he went to look, and this only lately.

He does not feel the cold, and neither do they, as if temperature has no place within the rigid corners of their world. Chikusa sits like an ice sculpture himself. Ken howls at the moon in the dark. M.M. is warm putty to the touch of Mukuro's hands, his every intrigued embrace, and he feels within her mind, underneath the arrogant surface of her thoughts.

He feels within her, and he could reach far enough to know her story, to understand what has caused her harm enough to be with them, to know what enraged desperation led her to break that glass or what ennui has driven her into his touches -- yes, he could understand, but for now, he chooses not to.

Chooses to simply breathe against her skin, as she whispers, "So that's what you're hiding from them, hn?"

(Discreet shrug of the shoulder in the direction of the window, the transparent film over it which she should be unable to see.)

"And you suppose that's all?" Mukuro deflects, answers without answer.

"Girls are supposed to play coy," she says, and tsks. "Not boys."

Never boys.

Her tone indicates that she knows. That she understands something of what he is. Somehow. Through some connection.

 _Estraneo,_ but her lips do not form the word. You came from France, Mukuro thinks, yet here you are in a private English academy; did you grow to the age you are now within a château, the child of the gentry? Or is there more to it?

You tell me you have a clarinet you’ve tweaked, or someone close to you has tweaked, such that it can boil flesh through its vibrations, and when you told me of it, after surrendering your talented little mouth to mine, I knew your story was so ridiculous that it must only be the truth.

But what world makes such technology, one could ask? I think I might suspect. Yes.

~*~

There was a time when their bodies knew the cold and knew how to shiver.

The indoors are nothing for Ken, for Chikusa, for Mukuro. Not even in winter.

“Aren’t you excited about going home, Mukuro-san?” Ken asks, and shoves himself against Mukuro, and in the dark, in the heated twisting of guarded bodies, him and him and him and her, the packed conditions of Ken’s jerking and Chikusa’s tension -- and M.M., top removed but not her brassiere, flat on her back, a hand beneath her head, ceiling-staring while the others speak, now that her own turn has passed – in this context, Mukuro becomes, for them all, wholly the male, the leader, smoothing down the wrinkles of the not-expressed anxieties of his not-friends.

“You’re inquisitive, tonight,” Mukuro deflects, again, and kisses him.

He grips Chikusa by the shoulder, massages in hard circles, even as he faces Ken, and asks of them both, “Are _you_ excited?”

Half-expects Chikusa to say: _You know I’m not, Mukuro-sama._

Instead: “It will be for the best, Mukuro-sama.”

“Do you remember when we were young?”

(“What? You’re like, not even twelve, are you?”-- M.M., detached from these musings.)

Mukuro ignores her. Ken nods, smiling and pleased. Chikusa’s sullen air abates, gradually, as Mukuro brushes his lips across his cheek, across the black lines which underscore their past; theirs is a triptych of enclosed experience, and Mukuro asks, again, “Do you remember?”

“Yeah. I do! Mukuro-san was awesome and rescued us,” Ken says, shivering excitedly, kissing-biting with teeth and tongue, Mukuro’s cheek and ear and throat.

“I remember,” Chikusa says, a barest thawing of cold be-spectacled eyes. Always open, for him: the both of them.

“I remember when we caught lots of fish,” Ken adds, words rushing together in aroused eagerness, the thrill of validation spurring him onwards. “And Mukuro-san had an amazing brush with death but survived because he’s so _cool._ ”

M.M. is perking in the background a little, at that. Mukuro hastily adds, “Ah. And what else do you recall, Ken?”

“I remember Parma,” Chikusa answers, still unsmiling, but hot to Mukuro’s touch.

He reaches up, as though to enact the familiar gesture of glasses-pushing; instead, he removes them, and simply holds the spectacles before him.

“I remember when they broke.” And Chikusa does not have to say to what he refers. “You found me new ones. Then.”

Glasses which were for a different prescription, probably; glasses which didn't fully help, but Chikusa won't say that. No.

Mukuro remembers when Ken could run barefoot, when he was in an environment which suited his tastes and his needs perfectly, when he was not called failing and troubled and a problematic child by various appointed institutions, those of society and civilization, those which tell you whether you are a success or whether you are a failure.

He remembers when Chikusa's silence was easy, comfortable. There was no one hovering over their shoulder, no one saying -- you must learn to talk, to smile, to be friendly, to wear shoes and become someone else, only you must never really become someone else as Mukuro does. No, that is too literal. Too literal.

It is only that you are not sufficient, for no one likes a boy who will not smile, and one distrusts a boy who smiles too much, and your energy, Ken, is destructive to these structures we have made, which you must love, you see.

~*~

I remember Parma.

I remember Never Never Land.

I remember freedom.

And before that, captivity.

I remember those with white coats, the not-parents who spoke to me of God and of the devil, sometimes, when they spoke to me at all. A cross, and it is Truth, but it was nothing like the hell I saw.

I saw a trident. A silver star.

I saw a place of fires and machines and dazzling beings.

I saw reality blurring, melting, swirling like water-colours, an oil bubble to burst at my fingertip, and I knew then what I could do. It seemed the easiest thing in the world. But I never saw the world, then. Not this world, so loud and foreign, and nowhere like that land I escaped to when they cut open my body.

I only saw what I had made.

And then I saw you.

It's my secret, isn't it?

I had spoken before, sometimes, but it was then when I learned I wanted to speak.

It was then when I cared for language, and thought to find for myself a name.

I wanted to talk to you both.

It's funny, really.

I suppose you never saw the grey place, which only I could see, and never told you of.

I suppose you never saw that I was standing there, then, alone. I was always alone. But I called without a voice. I called out, then, except I think, really, that it was only in my own mind.

And you couldn't have heard, no.

Yet you came to me.

~*~

In the morning, their bodies entwined beneath the covers, the room is oven-warm, the unique and incredible warmth that permeates from human flesh, even Mukuro’s own, emitting waves of heat, his skin lit from their touches, invisibly aglow in a way he has never been before, the happy fizzing of the fingertips and mouths and the places they have touched.

In the morning, a fresh layer of frost coats the ground, but none within their space feels the oppressive chill of the sky. Dawn replaces starlight. The trees are ghostly, spectral, resting winter life, a kind of hibernation, and Mukuro closes his eyes and sees the grey world. He reaches up, as if expecting to feel a circle of stitches, but there is only skin. His eyes open.

“So you figured out, I take it,” M.M. says. “About the schools?”

“I did think it was a strange coincidence,” Mukuro admits. “Meeting someone with your… capabilities, quite at random.”

She laughs, contemptuously. “Yeah. Well. Welcome to the experiment, Mukuro-chan. Big brother is watching you, and all that.”

The other two are still sleeping soundly. Mukuro rises, drapes the covers over the three of them, tucks them as high as the girl’s chest as she watches -- hair in disarray, leaning dreamily on one arm, the expression of a sedative addict, of one whose dramatic existence is only extreme enough to cover the intense _ennui_ (and look, dearest, it is even a word in your beloved French) of her life.

“You might say that,” he agrees, and runs a hand along Chikusa’s cheek, Ken’s scars.

Mukuro pulls back, abruptly, and goes to sit at his desk. He hugs himself tightly, one sleeve drooping to expose an extra slice of shoulder and neck, and, with great care, he removes his printed itinerary, regarding the date with scrutinizing eyes, lips curving in an expression of the sincerest pleasure, the sweetest anticipation, and holding up the paper to the morning light filtering in through the patched-over window, he says, “But tomorrow, it is my big brother through whom I shall do the watching.”


	13. (not with a bang, but with a whimper)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ wow, thanks for all the kudos, whoever you are!! o_o
> 
> \+ it is actually a coincidence that this chapter is set on Christmas Eve. I'd planned that since October, and only now have I gotten around to finishing a chapter which is set... around Christmas time... while it's Christmas time irl. Hmm. Strange circumstances. :)
> 
> \+ NOT EXACTLY THE HAPPIEST CONTENT, this time. warnings for, umm. messed up psychology, I suppose, and violent-ish things. Mukuro, Mukuro, Mukuro.

Taormina Harbour. Christmas and a flight. Endless blue of the North Atlantic, followed on its heels by the Mediterranean Sea, forever stranded from its allied waters by the enormity of the land.

In some life that even Mukuro cannot remember, the continent did not hold these shapes, did not confine in its grasp the seas that flow into the oceans.

All was one ocean, one mass of sky and one mass of earth, and someday, one day, this drifting earth will break, and the waters will overflow. _Forever_ will be no more; the Sicilian volcanoes will unite. All mountains in the world will link sooty, orange-glowing hands -- a ring of love, a pact of destruction. Last week, it was Mount Etna, and a closed airport. Catania-Vincenzo Bellini. Ashen sunset sky. A fire story.

Breathing the air, we live with small pieces of our own inevitable ends inside of us.

Beside him, she weakens with cold, sucks menthol lozenges. Rasps germs into a monogrammed handkerchief and watches what's left of the sinking volcanic sky as it passes the plane window.

"Isn't it lovely?" Mukuro says, quiet, leaning closer to follow her gaze.

He holds her hand in pretense. Her attention taken by the outer world, he squeezes her wrist.

Fingernails to a pulse point. Slithers under her skin and feels the chest rattle. Anatomical study: breathing. Automatic. So here is how these lungs work, the feeling of your sickness.

Across the aisle, Chikusa reads in-flight magazines on tourism. Business pictures. Ken plays in distraction with his seatbelt; kicks at the chair of the individual before him. Slurps in-flight drink, crunches in-flight ice. Steals an in-flight magazine (Chikusa's), and rips out pages when the stewardess is not looking.

"It's not as _drab_." And that is all M.M. will say.

Is she becoming less beautiful or is Mukuro becoming more bored. Her sickness fascinates his senses. He loves feeling a wounded body, but the conversation becomes a steady stream of complaints, and her _ennui_ has begun to give him _ennui_. He entertains thoughts of dramatically setting fire to last week's love letters (that is, those which she did not already dramatically set fire to). Still, for now, they sit together. It's something.

"I've had enough of London -- and its grey, and its rain." And Mukuro smiles at the passing stewardess. She returns the look, soapy, heart-claimed, enraptured. Beautiful little boy. "The red in the sky reminds me of my old home."

"Home?" M.M. strokes her face with the handkerchief's corners.

"Hell," he reminds her.

She sneezes, coughs -- simultaneously. Full blasted, trumpeted sound. Complete with snot. Mukuro tells himself he is certain it is a coincidence of timing.

Then, handkerchief disappearing, she pulls out her own special cushion from beneath her seat, lays it behind her head (which lolls, drowsily), and falls asleep. Snores. Loudly.

Mukuro forfeits conversation, wonders again what precisely Girlfriend entails in the human role of mate (and he has enjoyed it, play-acting like so), and dismisses the matter for a later date. There are pressing issues to consider.

The seatbelt inspires secret pain. Even sitting still, confined, loose though it is -- the old kneejerk feelings towards being held in one immovable place -- those old feelings, and Mukuro seeks distraction. He reads to himself and breathes steadily; works to make the stewardess fall mother-towards-child in love with him. She doesn't. Not quite. But she smiles. Smiles. Smiles.

No mother for him, then. None, ever. Only an old man. Only a brother. Only a cell dish or three.

Comedies-tragedies, plane fare for three children, not his own purchase, and then.

"We're home," he tells the girl, who wakes just before jet touches earth.

We're home. And he grins through the body-shake trauma of landing, the blinding of sun. Grins: beatific, impossible. Warm.

~*~

Taormina Harbour. Arrival. Four children. Walking alone, unsupervised, to baggage claim.

When he had departed from Italy, years ago, Lancia had held Mukuro's hand, held his hand like a sentry against the heaviness of the world; went side by side with him as far as the ticket scan, security check-in, and Mukuro kept himself at a respectable distance, in a too-large suit, when he wanted to dangle from Lancia's arm as though it were a tree bough, and cling, koala-like, to his back, but he had been told already that a child ought to appear proper. Dignified.

Left half-moon crescents on those large hands, unfelt; unfeeling.

 _What if the plane crashes,_ Mukuro whispered. Imagine: Dizzying-falling, descent, a well-lit air coffin. Was he scared, really, or pretending. He hadn't known, himself, but Lancia squeezed his fingers, more gently than you'd think a man his size could have. Cupped his head. Soothing.

He had packed Mukuro's suitcase. Pressed his shirts. Bought him a milkshake and a burger in the airport terminal, and the pads of Mukuro's fingers left grease prints on napkins. Sleeves hanging off him. Couldn't you see he was too skinny to fit his skin, let alone the suit.

Lancia lent him a jacket, large enough to be a blanket, for too-cold English winters. Mukuro slept in its midst, sometimes. Remembering.

And now, what's changed.

Nothing but the clothes, which fit this time; tailored threads. And the absence of adults, because he's made this flight several times -- he and the other children, all by themselves, and if you can handle the wilds, if you can survive, running about, then what's a little detour in the air. If you've been below the earth, then why should the place above it frighten you at all.

Four children where there should have been three.

She bought her own plane ticket.

And she is the first one into baggage claim -- a dash, running hop-skip, that springing purposeful walk, leaving the others behind.

Maybe, Mukuro knows, because she cares for possessions in a way they do not.

"It's good to be home," Mukuro says, maybe another lie. Men have already arrived, well-dressed men with strong chests, holding their luggage, all of their luggage, weightlessly.

There was no permission asked. No invitation. They took, simply took. It's the way of adults.

"Where are they?" Mukuro asks their escorts, and a man he does not know, someone who must belong to a new allied Famiglia, understands to whom he refers (it is no secret), and he answers: the old man is -- the old man is ill. Or under the weather, shall we say.

It's that time of year. Winter. Cold and dreary. And he's getting on in years. Today was one of those days. Felt that he should remain in bed. But he will greet you upon your arrival at the estate. He anxiously awaits you, dear child; he's been awaiting you.

And Lancia?

"He's completing work in Northern Italy." Work. Professionalism. Mukuro's smile does not falter, not even for an instant, but his fist squeezes empty air; everyone else is, now, a thousand miles away. "It's -- taken a little longer than expected. He sends his regrets, but he's eager to see you, and he should be returning as we speak."

Northern Italy, they say. Where the Famiglia's newest iron clutches have come to exist, where the central business is now done, the growing location of the power structure, and it's explained to Mukuro in such couched terms.

Cosa Nostra. Men who respect their families. Men who respect their wives. Men who keep their appointments. Men who do their business. Men of honour in this world.

And you, our heir.

~*~

It's strange, somehow. It's strange, the trip. The ride home. Every inch from England to Italy.

Ken argues with Chikusa in meaningless meaning. Chikusa ignores him in that purposeful way. The intimacy of it all. Those two, in their own world sometimes, these days; like playing at love or war, but more simple.

M.M. toys with her face, with her hair, in the mirror of her rouge kit, as the driver croons over her, over the little girl who has come along, over Mukuro's cute new addition, and see, Mukuro is turning out all right. A girl. It's proof that Mukuro is turning out all right. Making bonds with the fair sex. It's something. Some beacon of normalcy.

Mukuro listens to the hum of the engine. The old sounds, machinery. A sound he enjoys. A sort of lullaby.

None of them speaks to him. Not one of them speaks to him. The two boys, preoccupied with happy discontent. The girl, preoccupied with what she holds in her hands, and what it shows her of herself. As if Ken and Chikusa have allowed a minor lapse -- as if they have let distance sink in -- in the presence of the girl, cleaving that much more steadfastly to one another and their pointless arguments.

Even after I allowed you all into my bed, Mukuro thinks. Even after everything. Even though you must revere me. I know you do.

And Mukuro would say: But it isn't my fault, is it? You had already been -- the two of you -- in the nights, even before. Even before. You mustn't form quiet displeasure with me for having the occasional human who fascinates me, my own beings to play with.

Mukuro would open his mouth. Would invite them to conversation with philosophical nothings. If he spoke, if he attempted, Ken and Chikusa would fall in effortlessly. He knows. He knows.

Even now. If he were to just make a move. If he were the first to make a move. And yet.

Mukuro fingers the smooth upholstery of the seats.

Closes his eyes, and lets himself be lulled, lulled by the hum.

~*~

What is it about the houses of the Old World -- the world before the light changed, and those who live in the dim-dark, in the sunset and shadowed lands. You came out of the castles and fortresses of that ancient world that Italy was. You lit torches. Lamps. You preside over casks of wine, cellars, curtains. You, Cosa Nostra, shake hands above the table, but under the stairs.

Christmas dinner, chandeliers, Virgin and child, crosses on your chests, black fabric and the twinkle of cufflinks. Christmas dinner, rehearsed, ornate, softly lit. Many guests. Perfect. Meaningless. The old man sits at the head of the table. Mukuro fills the once-starved stomach. There is talk of gifts. The gun, Mukuro thinks. Give me that. It can be termed a pawn, if you give it now.

Instead, the old man passes unto Mukuro a book -- passes it down the length of the dining table, hand to hand. A weary, leather bound tome. Gilded script.

"The Divine Comedy," Mukuro says. "One of my favourites."

"Along with the works of John Milton," the old man notes, regarding his ward with careful, scrutinizing eyes, "but Dante Alighieri is of our native soil, our country's ancestor. I hope you will enjoy."

He speaks of blood and he speaks of inheritance. He speaks of his children and his parents and his parents' parents, and what will be his children's children. Family, we put Family before everything, and where, Mukuro wonders, does that leave me? Because he is not family, nor Family, and you do not consider him so. Do not pretend otherwise.

But you do. You are always pretending. But that. That can go two ways.

"Coffee," says the old man, with his knuckles to his chin, stately, and a servant pours. "Rum, for the holidays. A small serving."

Mukuro drinks beneath the watchful eye, pretending it is the first time for coffee. The rum is alcohol burn, so his throat grows hot and cool and irritated and his nose leaks. Pink warmth to the cheeks. He excuses himself, when it is applicable. Animal-stunned.

In the backyard, where the bushes stack high and the morning glories grow, and the night flowers open, there lie stone steps that lead to a stone turret; perhaps sad, perhaps old. Weathered, sun-beaten.

Mukuro climbs up, where he can overlook the garden.

There is a breeze at night, and it's cooler with winter, but this is still the southern land of Italy.

"Soon," says a voice behind him -- "soon, it will be abandoned."

His legs crossed, Mukuro fingers the tome. Still holding it. Palm flat to its surface. Smoothing, as if the cover were wrinkled.

"You're late," Mukuro play-rebukes; their bodies in the bug-spattered dark.

"Not late," Lancia answers, quietly. "It's the eve of Christmas."

"You missed Christmas dinner." Laughing, so his shoulders shake. Thin shoulders, still. "The last supper, senpai."

"I didn't know you'd come to believe."

Mukuro edges, edges around, edges on the stone, his eyes sliding as if on scales, tipping with his head, as he looks, bemused, at his senpai. "And when did I say I didn't believe?"

Lancia sits beside him. Sits, in that large, ungainly way, like there's too much of himself to know what to do with, and Mukuro is too small. "You've grown," he says, anyway. "They tell me you have a girlfriend, now."

"Is that what they say? I don't remember telling them that."

Mukuro smiles up at him -- the feel of the hand on his head, over his forehead, that hand which used to inspect for fevers, large enough to crush his skull, to break his growing bones. How often Mukuro has considered the power of those hands. Didn't you say you could hurt to protect me, kill to protect me. Are you in on it. Do you know. Do you know everything.

"I'm sorry I'm late," Lancia says, and it sounds sincere. The insects hum, a lively throbbing night. "I wanted to meet you at the airport, but work--"

"It was busy."

"I came as quickly as I could, Mukuro."

"Did you wash your hands, senpai?"

And, as though it were an accusation, the protective, sheltering fingers slide from the crown of Mukuro's head. A jerk back, as if from a hissing serpent, and Mukuro adds, with no lapse of time: "I only meant -- germs, you know. It's cold, and the girl with me is sick, I think."

"I want to hear all about that," Lancia returns, composure regained with a laugh, because he laughs nowadays, because this is how he deals with Mukuro, nowadays.

"Me, too."

Mukuro stands, book in his two hands, and closes the distance. Presses up warmly against the man, with his elbows out; the book like a battering ram between them, and slowly, Lancia's arms encircle him, and slowly, Mukuro nestles against him as he did in the days before he left for school -- the private days, the anxious days, only the haggard threat has been peeled aside, because there are no doctors, no inspections, no removals, no uncertain future. Only the two of them, Southern crumbling Italy, where Lancia tells Mukuro the stronghold will cease to be, because we're moving north -- north, to the bitter expanse, where our important allies live, and he recites haunting empty names; his washed-clean hands, his odor of leather and cologne. Stroking the boy's ears, the cheeks thinning with the whisper of adolescence, the neck where the pulse leaps. Hugging, ultimately, and Mukuro pretends, pretends that there is no infinity of opposition between them, that they are not two sides of an unspoken war, pretends they are equal, pretends his jaw does not clench, pretends he is not afraid, pretends there is no hate in this world, and he embraces this man, his senpai.

And then.

After everything passes, can you learn to love him?

~*~

What Mukuro did not say is: To disbelieve in heaven is not to disbelieve in God.

Were God an atheist, you might find it within you to call this ironic.

To lie in the dark with your wicked eye, thinking, at night, someone might creep in and smother you while you try to sleep. Like this, like a story unfolding, Gothic; an American's imagination they teach to children. When I was a child and you were a child. There was no sea, but that of blood. I dreamed, and you entombed my first love, I think. I reminisce. I dream.

Yes, you did.

Can you remember how to love him?

While the earth rests, one foot to the ground, then the other, Mukuro climbs from his bed.

The space of the walls, the shelves of books, the covers; this place, now, belongs to him. He feels Place around him, against him, beside of him, under him, detected by his eyes, by his certain feet, by his groping hands, down the lightless hallways. The wood stands, permanent. A monolithic existence. The rugs return steady pressure. The moon pushes through the glass. The glass looks down.

Space is inhabited by him; it knows its owner, and he moves, purposeful and quiet.

Holes await the turn of the key. Hinges rest in preparation for movement. Carpets smooth themselves to be walked on. There is no life to them anymore, not in what remains of these trees, this earth; there is no animus, but they exist in open, perfect preparation, dull, dead, dreaming, without sentience. They wait for life, and so his life, Mukuro's life, gently extends, touches them, claims them. They accept. This, the language of shadows.

You sleep with the door shut tightly.

You sleep with the door locked.

Whose hand inserts the key.

Whose hand turns the knob.

~*~

To sleep with your wicked eye is to invite murder.

The light cracked in through the doorway, and they took you apart. Put your beating heart beneath the floorboards. Is it still there. Is it under the tiles of that room. Has cement poured over it (not wooden planks). If you listen, can you hear it.

It's too late at night to see the roses outside. Are they the roses you once saw, in that room from sometime, or never; did you dream them, blooming? Blooming, blooming in darkness.

Kneeling at the side of the bed of him: your father who is not. Your grandfather who is not.

Kneel as if to pray. To the cross, though; no. Not that religion. Pray to Krishna. Pray to yourself. Ask freedom from this life. Ascend it.

Seventy years old if he's a day and he sleeps, grave-peaceful. Imagine the eggshell eyelids he must have had, once. Only crinkled papery thin things, now, but in the moonlight, his skin is smooth. Alive.

 _Was it Christmas Eve when God killed his son?_ you whisper, and remember: not _killed_ , but sacrificed.

_Oh. I said the wrong word. Forgive me, please._

He sleeps. The one who took you in, sleeping. With his own children and children's children gone, removed, far away. Hands washed. Fingernails trimmed. Old crimes gently tucked away. Why did he lock the door at night. As if he hasn't forgotten his imprint on the world, or those who still hold grudges.

The pages of the book he gave you, a present, now unfold before your willing hands.

A strange sound, a strange touch, and something drops, and you pick it up. Clasp it. Hold this something to the moon's light in the window and recognize it for what it is: a key. A golden or gilded key. But not the one to open this room. What, then?

 _Tell me,_ you whisper. _Why did you send me there?_

To that other country, that city, rainy London.

_And there you made plans for me._

To be watched, overseen.

_Or had you already made them? Did you make them before we met, when I was planning, too?_

Kakimoto Chikusa: Obedient, if unpleasant.

Joushima Ken: Sedated. Difficult.

Rokudo Mukuro: Happy. Special. Dangerous. Suspected of murder (but not proven; no, how could you have proven the deed?). Probable culprit behind the Estraneo massacre. To be trained. Cultivated. Put to use. Bonds with the other boys. With Lancia.

 _Who,_ you recite, sing-song, _was to kill me, if necessary._

The connection, observed early, would pacify the child. Like a lion raised by a dog in the confines of a zoo.

The child, though even-tempered (but alarming; he watches the news of horror with rapt, unnerving attentiveness) does not form friendships easily.

Other children at his school seem to talk around him. Walk around him. They talk to him as you would talk to hear yourself speak. He listens to them as if studying. He does not make friends but seldom. Seldom: There is something, and who can say what it is? With those two boys. With this man.

Lancia.

Be the mother dog with the orphaned lion cub who plays and paws about you, sheathing its claws.

Perhaps it is because they both came from the wilds. Both wild creatures, once. We tamed one. And the other -- this is a promising trust, indeed. Can you learn to love him? Can you learn to love him?

But. And it would be a waste --

But, were he to turn dangerous --

Children, like animals, hurt because you hurt them. Still, if you cannot manage a living thing, if it cannot be made to fit order, if it escapes and eats the farmer's fowl, then it must be shot.

Mukuro closes his eyes and imagines his senpai's giant hand crushing his throat.

How intimate.

To be broken down, to be crushed, and would Lancia find inside of him, if he tore him apart, Mukuro's living heart? Would Mukuro weep, the tears squeezed from him by the force of betrayal? Or would it not be betrayal at all, but a survival-based certainty? A Darwinian expression of life. The fittest taking its proper place. The powerful over the powerless.

Not a gunshot, Mukuro hopes. Don't kill me in that aloof way. Taint your hands. Touch me, at least.

Wouldn't it be nice. An image of pathos. Searingly near in proximity; two human beings.

Mukuro play-acts, still kneeling, hands clasping his neck. A collar, a memory. Tracing the flow of blood. All is where it should be.

Lets go.

Looks up at the bed, at the still-sleeping man. At the man who suspects nothing. Would say nothing. Would wake, in the dark, were he to hear, and pat this child's head with a chilled hand: _go to sleep_ , Mukuro, he would say. You frightened me out of my wits, Mukuro.

_You missed your best opportunity. Christmas Eve. Symbolism. Isn't that what it's called?_

And Mukuro is gradually losing feeling in his legs.

He waits, still. Waits to feel something. Some hesitation. But there is none. No, there never is.

"It's a pity, isn't it? Maybe. I can't say. Or maybe it's like the weather. Did you hear about the volcano?"

He thinks he will take the pillow and press it down.

Will he scream, now. If you smother him, the old man in the dark (even if yours is the eye).

Maybe he would have cried out, something heart-rending, cinematic or literary, but at the last possible instant, Mukuro changes his mind. Instead, he extends his consciousness. A creeping shadow. The afflicted, arthritic hands come to life with renewed energy, a strength they have not held in years -- Jesus working a miracle on the infirm -- and the body jolts, jolts as though in arrest. Unglamorous.

Of their own will, the hands reach for the pillow.

Softness spreads over the face. The body breathes stuffing.

~*~

It never hurts like drowning did when it is another person's body, Mukuro says, afterwards.

He is always a little disappointed by this. It would be fitting, if it hurt.

Instead, it merely shakes you into awareness.

"I suppose it would be best if you dealt with the corpse," he informs Lancia, sweetly, shrugging a little. "It's only that my hands are too small to hold those large shovels and dig with strength. And perhaps we should take enough money from his account to give him a good coffin. He would like that. And the dogs wouldn't dig him from the garden. I owe him for this lovely book."

Lancia cannot hear him. Not in any conventional sense, not yet. Perhaps, deep down in the recesses of the subconscious which the psychologists do not even fully comprehend, he is imbibing every word, hanging from it, and Mukuro's power makes it so, but he cannot hear in the way that humans hear speech, one to another, but then, Mukuro thinks, are they truly human in the night? And look at you, giant and mute. A stone-faced automaton. It's beautiful.

I feel like I can tell you anything, Mukuro thinks. I feel we can learn to love one another, now.

"Though we won't have time for the others to be buried. And their ends will be... messier, I'm afraid. But thank you, senpai. Thank you for opening the door." (His hand presses the key into Lancia's palm -- curling the fingers over it, one by one, one-piggy, two-piggy. Smiling, at ease. Just the two of them, conversing beyond the powers of words, of any words in any languages.) "Thank you. But. Keep it, please. There are still other doors to open."

Mukuro closes the book.


	14. said the scorpion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ some implications of non-consensual (well, somewhat dub-con in my intention, but I think for safety's sake, non-con)... things... here. NOT sex, no, or particularly graphic. but -- mukuro's powers/creepy controlling actions deserve some kind of warning by this point, I think.
> 
> \+ and still underage. IMPLICASHIONNSSS only; I suck at porn and probably wouldn't out and out porn these guys at this stage, anyhow.
> 
> \+ FINAL CHAPTER! I FINISHED IT. :') Although, uhhhh, I could just as easily write a sequel, 'cos their life following all this is endlessly fascinating. In fact, I probably will write more fics about it, because KOKUYO. \o\ Note chapter will follow, including inspirations, etc. Thanks to anyone who read all this!

It requires a certain leap of faith to accept the lies.

It requires belief of the human kind to enter the bedroom of the patriarch of the Famiglia Da Luca as though it were a shrine housing sacred relics. Faith is to look for, and to see (confirmation of) the gentle rise and fall of the chest. A body breathing beneath the covers, which are too heavy and oppressive in one light, or too sparse in another. It depends upon the play of something. Moonlight, starlight, fire light, and shadows. When the body thins and withers with age, the sheets are ragged, hospital-like, or as heavy as the pall of the grave.

In the morning, his Family sees what they wish to see. Our sire breathes because we expect (hope) that he shall breathe. Is it -- (it's not) -- a trick of the closed window, and does the room appear to have housed the presence of another? But it was locked. The door was locked when we came before noon to check upon –

Let us call it imagination.

To feel as though anything is amiss with the scene. The sense of an absent presence. Or perhaps a lingering presence. Or a book overturned. Or an indentation, the remnant of a footfall, or a break in the dust. No. Nothing of the sort.

Let us call it imagination.

See how he breathes.

~*~

Mukuro bites his fingernails to broken nubs in pleasant silence, locking the door of his own room under the pretense of reading during the day. His new book, you see, the Christmas gift, and he sits with his knees outward, thumb-thumb-thumbing the pages, which slide like onion-skin past his fingers, peeling, burning crisp at the slightest touch, curling black, falling to ash, and then --

He feels another person (thus one of his) beyond the doorway, feels the body approaching, the delicate feet on the ancient floors (now carpeted where once there were tiles and wood).

\-- and then he smiles, and the door opens. A picked lock.

The pages reform, ash by ash. Text re-writes its letters. Destroyed bits of soot smooth themselves to bleached white paper once more.

Not Ken, whose feet would be exuberant-agitated, heavy. Not Chikusa, who shuffles with a bent back. A softer stride -- that of the girl.

Mukuro strokes his chin. Watches her enter, waits for her to sit with him -- permission ungranted, invitation not yet extended.

And it's quiet.

Surreal. A quiet like they've never felt together, just the two of them. Perhaps one for which they never had the time. Companionably mute, you might say if you observed it, albeit distressed in that indefinite, post-crisis manner, like the silence of loss (which -- Mukuro would say, were he another person -- is not so far from the truth). Cemetery voicelessness, never even punctuated by the outdoors or bird cries. Only the echoes of the walls and the creaking old house begin, gradually, to indicate that noises may stir somewhere in this world.

With a slight rustle, the first break of any living sound across the silent shores, she draws forth a pack of menthol cigarettes.

"I thought you liked cloves," Mukuro says.

"I didn't bring any."

M.M. lights and smokes, casually turning her head to face away from him.

After a moment, over that swallowing silence: "Merry Christmas, Mukuro-chan."

"And yet," Mukuro lies. "It's only exactly like any other day."

"'Cause it's commercial . . . " Her words, like the fancy recitations of Catholic school children behind closed doors. Private, exciting blasphemies -- the way her chin juts, victorious, over _commercial_ , the way her voice finds speed and vitality, briefly. "And really, all that Christ stuff is kind of tacked on."

Proclamation made, her voice dies again. Sinks to a trough, its peak forgotten.

Her hair has not been brushed. It hangs strangely limp. A single golden clip on one side, and she slides a thumbnail's width of strands behind one ear. "It’s just about getting things. For most everyone. Hell, me, too. I'm just being honest about it, though."

Mukuro's lip quirks. His eyes are lit but dead. Will-o'-the-wisps of decomposition. Grave-rot bright. Empty. He glimpses his own reflection in the single mirror, a sort of poltergeist. "And yet --" (familiar start) "You won't be receiving any presents this year. Not here."

"Jeez." Coughing, momentarily. Hand over her mouth. Almost demure. Almost. Never. "It feels like a funeral home in here."

"That's a terrible habit," he says.

Terrible. And unhealthy, too.

~*~

And you were sick on those days, no less.

Imagine that. Smoking while you had a chest cold, or some other affliction of the body.

It’s funny how –

When he took it from your lips, dropped it to the floor and pressed it out with the big flat square of his book (like you’d kill an insect), he expected you to resist, but you only stared, wide-eyed, as if you were being murdered, or having a pre-emptive heart attack. And then he took your hand, and held it up. Held it to the light, so you could both see how small your hands were.

And he thought you would cry in earnest. But you only scrunched up your face. Petulant. Like a little girl. Which you looked like, then, and which, after all, you were.

“What I wonder,” he said, “is who made you. Whether it was one person or many, and whether you had your chance at getting back. Or maybe not a 'who,' but a 'what.' But I think there was a who."

For there is always a _who_ , somewhere. Always a few of them waiting to be unburied from the rot of your garden.

“You talk crazy, and I don’t know what you mean,” you lied.

And Mukuro closed his eyes and laughed, without malice. He touched your cheeks with hands that, last night, had meant to cause another body harm, but had held back, letting larger hands do the work.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

 _I’m sorry,_ he sing-songed. _I know we’re reaching an end soon, you and I and this, and I never even learned what those letters stand for, did I? I suppose it was dishonest of us to not tell each other things._

But last night, dishonesty died.

Are you here to mourn it with me?

We’re not going back to school, he explained. We’ll be on the run from now on.

So? That’s what I prepared for, you reminded him. Also -- look, Mukuro-chan. You’re acting really weird. Did you do something last night?

You know (he admitted) –

You know. The thing about Ken and Chikusa is (it’s rare, him speaking of them; he does not speak of them, only _to them_ and their names are like oaths, like swearing, and you perked to attention), they don’t tell me anything I’ve never known before. So I think of them as –

He touched his chest. As if the pronouns were impossible. Sacred.

“I thought, though -- oh, it's silly, you know, but I thought -- "

And then he explained the story to you. Every detail. Every last betrayal.

Like he expected you to understand. Like he looked to you to understand.

It must really hurt, you wanted to say. Crucifying pain or Buddhic starvation, but you don’t even believe in that shit. Bitches getting all the pity for being God. Try living a decade as a girl. Did he ever even ask how you felt? Do they ever?

(She killed those words -- too much of an admission.)

“I’d show you my scars,” he concluded. “But you won’t tell me yours. So . . . we’re even.”

You swallowed. Thinking, don’t do that. If he did that, you might fall in love with him. Minute by minute, it’s happened. Is happening. No. Too much honesty.

Try switching lives, you thought. Being me. 

(Your pride was way too much to ever say anything more. Love abridged. So it goes.)

“The valuables are all yours,” he said. “Tonight. Take them. I was only lying before, about gifts.”

And here, he kissed you, smiling. Still beneficent. 

You wanted to knock that smile off again. Smug, holy bastard.

“I have business, now."

He didn't even say goodbye!

You were left to imagine the goodbye.

In the separation of small fingers, fingers that will soon clutch golden pieces, and confessions unspoken. Artery-spaces of emotions. Blocked passages.

It must hurt, being so endlessly preoccupied -- never able to achieve that one cathartic release, and never able to rest. 

What must it be like, being Mukuro-chan. Isn't that just awful to think about?

You don’t even tell him that you know you can’t buy anything in this world without hurting someone else. People suffer for whatever is made. It’s only why anything has value.

And him, and you, too. It hurt for you both to be made, but that’s why you’re valuable, and why Mukuro-chan is the most valuable of all. 

But maybe they, the adults, never saw that.

And you won’t tell him, either, that you still believe in God.

As if he hasn’t already heard it all.

~*~

Little boys’ shoes are white, but men’s are black and shine.

Little boys, those you find outside, those running about in the cobbled, shadowed streets of Italy, Europe, America. They’re all around the world, these beings, and often darting hobgoblin-like before doorways, or in back of yards. It’s a phenomenon. An infestation. With white shorts and white shoes and white shirts; no designer logos, no cuts in the fabric to signify special make. Formless, like their lumps of bodies. It hadn’t taken a thought to mend the holes, to paint over the blood, to patch the ever-scraped knees.

Mukuro remembers: Three-four years of abstractions, shapeless white shirts that hang over skin. The occasional suit which would never quite fit the too-small, refusing-to-be-nourished meat and bones of him, and the polo shirts and school uniform which did (but only after precise tailoring). And always, through every sartorial shift: white shoes. A single wide Velcro buckle. Laces in knots that untie themselves with each step up and down those sets of stairs.

White, the colour of innocence in one land, or death in another. Angels’ wings and burial shrouds.

Mukuro slides them from his feet; fastens the Velcro neatly.

Lancia’s gone out tonight.

Didn’t you hear?

Talking, in the hallway, beyond the bedrooms –

He went to play cards, and soon, he'll be going to Mass.

We should go to Mass, too. Soon.

But perhaps later.

Right now, business -- business is happening --

"I called today," Mukuro tells the boys (it was him, this time, who went to their room, finger to his lips in a conspiratorial hush; ushered them out, to Lancia's bedroom), "I bought a train ticket. Do you remember when we went to Parma, and I'd planned -- " And his smile lightens, relieves itself over the memory: " -- Ah, that's right. I'd planned to take us there, then, when we went to the city. But you know how it is."

"Where, Mukuro-sama?" Chikusa asks. (Always Chikusa, analyzing: as if their lives are a dramatic rendition, a play, a farce, and he sets forth the leading questions for the central character's exposition, and Mukuro thinks -- maybe so, yes. Maybe we were made to fit this jigsaw puzzle contraption of discourse.)

Anywhere but here, Mukuro thinks, and says, "To Northern Italy. Brescia."

To where Lancia was born.

Imagine that. Imagine it: a distance from here to there, unfolding, byzantine, before your open eyes. 591 miles. 950 kilometers – what a nearly perfect reversal of numerical values, marred only by that one stubborn mile. A nine, a five, a zero. You could not ask for more ideal numbers. The levels of hell, if Dante measured correctly, counted to the highest of these, but he was off by three. Still, a lovely thought.

Imagine: the lands of Italy, the fields of green streaming beyond train windows of years ago, trips uncounted. Mukuro has visited the Capitolium, Piazza del Foro, when Lancia’s body was near unto the size that his own is now. Only margins of bone, tissue, muscle striations and marrow separating them; only years separating their orphaned, abandoned realities.

Imagine this for what it is.

Homecoming.

“Our lives will be different, of course,” Mukuro explains. Barefoot, he plunders the closet. Guts it of clothing (too large, but it will be easy enough to remake them into something worthwhile and of use). Lancia has already opened the Famiglia’s safe. Presently, he will be liquidating assets and emptying his own bank account.

“What an organized and simple man my senpai is,” Mukuro tells the others, appreciatively.

The bedroom contains almost no valuables to speak of.

No gold (the girl would be displeased), no portraits of either Famiglia or blood relations, no lovingly frozen constructions of the faces of angelic, reality-cremated women. Dear senpai. He would know that such illusions lack the substance necessary. They constitute only the failure of the reality principle. He would keep his living space bare in the hope of honesty. Isn’t that right?

Wooden furniture, white sheets, white covers, the slanting light of evening in a single window.

“There’s nothing here to suggest he ever had a single desire.”

No ornamentation, no posters, no gaudiness. Only the Bible and the cross. Sitting weightily, apologetic for their own existence, as religions so often are when they outline the starkness of human habitation.

“Is this what being an adult is like?”

Rhetorical, for the boys cannot, will not answer.

Mukuro packs a suitcase. What a life. Standing in the margins between the minutes with no adornment. It’s funny, he thinks, that this would have been him, could have been him, but he will run from this living that defines itself by waiting only for death. It’s scary. It’s nothing short of terrifying. And we’re going home.

A jerk of the wrist, creeping fingers – and he takes the black shoes (so finely polished).

He presses one (merely half a set, how lonely) to his cheek.

“Hey,” says Ken, and his ear twitches, and they all three turn – as if it is dark and the beam of a flashlight has found their animal-shining eyes. “I hear a door!”

“Ah, yes. On time,” Mukuro says (knowing -- ). “To free us, then.”

Teeth of a zipper scraping luggage closed, belongings disappearing, and they are ready.

~*~

It could almost be yours.

That could almost be your city. Your walls. Your childhood. Two boys, two eras. One benefactor. Memories, drifting, dissonance. They could almost be your shoes, though you will never fit them in this body. (There are, of course, others, and now this will be one.) That could almost be you, head lolling on the train, cheeks freed from the markings they will someday have. Bare and peasant-bronzed, that face, like a field worker, or a sun-abused child. Those fields could have been passing before your eyes.

Homecoming, it is.

Mukuro sniffs the air -- iron-tinged, tangy, so thick that he tastes it. It’s warm. Viscous. Oil slicks in red.

Wait.

“Senpai.”

Step forward (barefoot, wet between the toes). Step. Step. Drip-drop –

Wait.

Mukuro nudges a body with the tip of the trident. His silver (steel, wood, metals beyond name) apparatus. The bullet (that most special of bullets, in that most special of guns) is re-acquainted with him now, thanks to his efforts, and he re-acquaints himself with reality (or the facsimile thereof). Reality is warm and bleeding all over the carpet. Reality is the sleek black gun in those long, elegant fingers he’s always admired: the gun pointing at Lancia's own head, death from Lancia's own hand.

A room full of broken bodies, a child, a suicide attempt in the making.

“You’re very powerful,” he whispers. “I want to be as strong as you someday."

The recognition of human beings -- it’s nearly enough to knock them to their knees. Lancia’s eyes: dull, rolling back white. One mind; synapses, ganglia, and above twenty million neurons, and it’s not enough, or maybe too much, for the impression of the scene before them, which Lancia, with all his aggregate human stubbornness, is denying, and has been denying since last night. A reflexive self-murder.

Mukuro slides the gun from his teacher-brother's hand.

And the eyes meet his.

~*~

Mukuro imagines –

Tackled to the floor. His skull broken in. Hands around his throat. A collar of suffocation.

Mukuro imagines –

A scream, inhuman, bestial, heartrending.

Lancia stares, knowing what he does not want to know, what above twenty million neurons fight against, the entire pressure of a body concentrated into one infinite, hyperreal burst of awareness. All the world in this moment. It’s incredible, what a mind can insist on the denial of, but nothing is so vicious as reality. Even an illusionist knows that. Maybe especially an illusionist.

No lunge. No scream. Stillness, instead. Quiet.

“Why,” a single word, gust of breath, dust-dry. Heavy, as if Lancia’s mouth were blood-filled. As if his tongue were numb and dead.

“You did what had to be done,” Mukuro tells him. Gentle, comforting, with the voice he has always used between the two of them. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”

The face twists. All mirth forgotten. Swept over, pushed under, and there’s only the rasping of breath. Fervent denial of object-subject; which is which between them, and Lancia says, “Why would you –“

Mukuro shakes his head. “You’re confused. You’re so confused. I’m sorry.”

There is blood, a sticky presence between the toes, on the heels and ankles, spattering on the bottom of Mukuro’s feet. He’s tracked tiny prints across the room. It’s all right. Lancia cares for him; will wash and scrub the space clean. They will take the murder weapons with them. Conceal as necessary. The mansion is far from the road, hidden behind greenery and the mask of the ancient world. No one will discover this scene for some days.

"You'll help me escape. You'll drive." Mukuro tilts his head. "I can't, you know. I've packed the car. Our friends are waiting for us."

There, on the floor, Mukuro recognizes the men he heard speaking outside Lancia's door when he stood with Ken and Chikusa. Blow to the cranium for one of them. The puncture of a bullet -- but he (this individual man) had managed to fight back beforehand. A tooth or two cracked in death. For the other man: three gun shots. A dying with impact.

You see. Death really isn't easy. It's not like in the movies. It's hard. It's the hardest, sometimes, to get a body to stop moving. Mukuro's been through them all now, six cycles, and this -- this is the other side. This dark room, twilit blue, with the open window and the gentle wave of the curtains. 

And just the two of them (alive, sharing secrets).

He puts down the trident. Puts down the gun. Presses a hand to his senpai's forehead (it's burning up), sweat slick furrows. 

With Lancia kneeling, edging on his knees (Mukuro is careful to pluck the broken glass from the floor, to keep the hurt from his senpai's bones and muscles, to keep his blood from spilling out of him and joining that on the floor), they are of a height, for the first time.

"Do you remember that story..."

Stubborn silence.

All right.

"Well, it was a while ago, now," Mukuro continues. "I was reading a man's writing, and it was very pretty, but you told me -- "

A glimmer. Dull-dawning realization, the barest flicker, but Lancia opens his mouth, and the only sound is an agonized groan -- long and low and like he didn't will for it to exit, and Mukuro reaches inside that mind, feels and confirms indeed that he did not intend for that noise to leave his body. It is only like hell rushing up, out and through him, a mechanical release.

"-- you told me he did something terrible, and that I mustn't know what. But I looked it up. I learned in school, you know. What a fascinating word: _incest_." Mukuro closes his eyes. Hums. Recites: _"Like you, I sought the kind of solitude that liberates, and I wept over secret, indefinable disappointments. Like you, I found the ways of the world absurd . . . "_

"Stop." 

(as though it should be a sob, but emptied of water.)

_"Like you, I hated school, because the dogma clipped the wings of my imagination. Like you, I loved flowers, books, music, worms, the sky and stars, the sea, the sun, trees . . . "_

Leaning forward, Mukuro presses his lips to his other body's cheeks. To the lips. Which remain closed, but vulnerable. Hesitant. A debatable middle space leaning towards supplication, and Mukuro swipes his tongue along the dry skin. 

His own eyes, his real body's eyes, close tightly. Intently.

_"Like you, I had a double life, a mysterious, burning and secret life..."_

(He memorized each individual word, each furtive, mysterious pain.) She understood. The girl understood. You must understand, too, Mukuro thinks, and I have practised this, this act, so many times, and I must be equal to those you take on your arm in the night.

Finally (lips curving, pulling upwards, a sad smile, a smile to break your heart):

_"I spent hours of ecstasy in a world of dreams where all was just, beautiful and sweet."_

The sadness vanishes, elusive as it was, so Mukuro is smiling vacantly, in that head-tilting way, in the dust and pollen of a fading boyhood. A final childhood dream, a final mad rush into the light, and here, now, in the echo chamber of this dying, dark room, amid the unreal bodies, Lancia's hands reach up. Reach up, like prayer hands, seeking succor. Mukuro lets them cradle him (lets them stroke the wild, unruly hairs in back of his head), lets the dry warm skin of his mouth touch him, taste him. The wet urchin-bumpy press of tongues. 

Two orphans, two lives, two crumbling pasts of being lost, found, lost again. And always needing that something more.

Where is the reality and where is the illusion.

This is hyperreal.

You want this, Mukuro whispers. (Reminds him.)

Lets go.

~*~

When Mukuro held the papers before Lancia, and pointed, and explained (still softly) that he was to be killed (by you, senpai) if plans went awry, Lancia (Mukuro) stared, stared, stared, then shook his head (in denial?).

No, he said. No, I never saw this, he said. I never knew. 

And Mukuro -- (the original) 

Mukuro investigated Lancia's thoughts. Looked into his mind to verify the honesty or dishonesty of this account, and said: I see! I see. You really didn't know, did you? You were never given a chance to be complicit, but it was still your duty, you know. It was your duty to kill me if necessary. And Lancia said: I couldn't have. I never could have. And Mukuro replied: But you must want to, now. Goodness, you must hate me! 

And Lancia went silent, and Mukuro did not bother to pick his brain a second time.

No, let the man have his feelings. Hatred is immaterial, now. It does not matter, not in the grand scheme of things. And if Lancia wishes to hate him, perhaps it is better that way. There's something comfortable, familiar, refreshing about the cool fluidity of hatred. Mukuro understands. He understands how it feels to be betrayed, tortured by that which you were meant to love. The ensuing emotions. What you must be feeling now. That's just it: he understands better than everyone. He has the most empathy for your condition. And that, senpai -- that is precisely why he put you through hell.

(Perhaps you don't quite comprehend, but you're still only human.)

You told me once, Mukuro reminded him -- you told me that, were anyone to try to hurt me, you would kill them. You would kill for me. You agreed. 

(Reluctantly, maybe, but you agreed.)

He said it while stroking his senpai's cheek. While brushing aside the sweat-matted hair. While taking the gun and carefully putting it away, so that Lancia could not think to make another attempt to hurt himself.

Together, they repaired the room.

There will always be traces, Mukuro explained, but I've covered them for now.

This is the second time (he told Lancia so).

Here, he elaborated. He detailed an account of his past -- of the first massacre, which was committed by Mukuro, so, therefore (small, soft hands wringing themselves, as if fretting, or thinking), so -- therefore, the second must also be by he who goes by the name of Mukuro. 

So, do you understand yet? 

By destroying them, those men, that _Cosa Nostra_ , you are _Mukuro_.

It is, after all, Mukuro's grudge.

And --

(Whispering, wetly, into his ear. Curling his tongue over the breathy syllables:)

 

This is how my story begins.

Once, there was a boy. That boy was an orphan (like you are). Or near enough to it. That boy was injured (like you were), but sometimes the scars run in paths that we cannot see. And that boy was betrayed (like you feel you have been, knowing now its taste). And then that boy was taken in (like you were), and by the same man, by the same people. So where, now, does that boy end, and where do you begin? Who is I, and who is you? I am you. Your mind, your body, your murderous hands; they are mine, and you are me. You are me.

So you must understand me.

Understand me.

Understand me.

Please.

~*~

Nine dead during the first round. Three more when the other men returned home. Twelve is a decent beginning, Mukuro tells himself.

They take their suitcases, their luggage, and leave the bodies behind them. It's night, and the stars are out, and the engine hums as Lancia cranks the car, like he did those years ago when he took the three boys for a ride through Taormina, to the open air cafè, when Mukuro had dreamed different dreams, a different, illusory life, even knowing then that someday he would say goodbye; someday he would have to say goodbye. 

_Panchatantra_ , ancient sanskrit stories: said the scorpion to the turtle, "It's only my nature." A tale as old as human history. As old as six layers of hell and living.

Mukuro is almost twelve years old, was a murderer at six. The scene repeats. Only --

"What's wrong, Mukuro-sama?" Chikusa asks, when they pack themselves into the backseat of the vehicle. Ken lays his head in Mukuro's lap. Mukuro strokes his hair (with all the love, all the tenderness in this world). M.M., to the far right, sits prim, isolated, absurd in her white mink stole, the red of her hair a shocking contrast. She's far too small, too pinched with that simmering, implacable ire, to look quite as proper as she hopes. Coolly, she tucks her hands into her lap. Raises her knee. 

And all is as it never has been -- as if it never were. A status quo of nothingness. Of this little everything.

“I'm fine,” Mukuro says (in that humming way), touching his temple, barely, then splaying his hand over the red eye, which pulses. Some nerve, twitching like an old pain. “After all, I have you all, again.”

He reaches out with the other hand. Grasps Chikusa by the shoulder (expectantly stiff), massaging lightly, thoughtlessly. Ken surges up as soon as the words have left Mukuro’s mouth; bumps their noses in his haste, and kisses Mukuro in that sloppy, eager way, metaphorical-literal tail wagging, familiar heady musky scent, familiar heady musky movements, drawing Mukuro out, out, out of the deepening dark, out of that jagged-edged crevice at the bottom of his thoughts; his mind’s abyss, bottomless. 

Mukuro kisses back in that panicked way, with the secret energy which undermines his regular, lazy motions. Desperate to touch, smell, feel -- weight, skin, animal-hunger, hot flashes of sensation.

Like being jolted into warm life. 

“You _always_ have us, Mukuro-san,” Ken says, their eyes level -- his are bright with meaning, purpose, affection, and Mukuro looks at them, the of three of them, as if for the first time. 

Something snaps. They are the same age. All children. Feel the pull of the rubber band. Let go. Let go. Breaths of air and fingers against your scalp, the endless corn-yellow of hair. How big, sturdy, wise you’ve grown against me. 

Surely the day will come when they have no need of him. But it never will.

“Open the car window, _stupid girl,_ ” he says, as purposeful as Mukuro, and with grunting, a fond-exasperated rolling of the eyes, M.M. eases the glass half-way, and the wind whips their faces, wild as winter, an insane cold. Chikusa holds his hat. 

Ken drags Mukuro (Mukuro lets himself be dragged) to the side, to where the air burns his skin, and together, feeling the others’ keen eyes in the background, following their line of sight, Chikusa’s fogged glasses, M.M. holding her hair -- together, they lean out the window, as the car drives away. Together, all four bodies, four containers of private hopes, anxieties, holding their breaths in secret trepidation, in a vast, limitless universe of possibilities, in a night as large as their thoughts. Large enough for all Mukuro’s existences, their many-faceted ties to one another, for all their love, but too vast to ever say. You couldn’t speak. It would get swallowed by the night. As does the laughter, which comes now, and from Ken, too, beside him. Holding him, still.

Watch the silhouetted trees catch the gusts, watch the shadows of the mansion melt away, severing your boat from the shores of reality, and off we go again. A new adventure.

Like all those years ago, like Lancia, who wanted something different for Mukuro.

(And it could have never been. It could have never been different. And this he must believe.)

But wasn’t it wonderful to pretend to be cared for so effortlessly.

“Let us go together, then,” Mukuro says, though the wind scatters the words.

Seven minutes more and it’s passed out of sight, that last desolate play of moonlight, knife-gleam lonely smile of the fountain spray and the dew-dropped shrubs. Gone, the life unlived, ghosts of what-was-not. Walls will creak forever. It will be haunted. 

Someone rolled down the window, sometime. Chikusa sketches figures in the fog.

Mukuro leans forward.

 

“These are your new best friends. This is your new life, and they will take good care of you,” he says (you did not see him glance at the rear view mirror. he did not become salt.), tapping the back of the neck of the man who drives, whose eyes never waver from the road, limitless and black.

“You’re welcome, Mukuro,” he adds. “You’re welcome.”


	15. notes + shout-outs

I DECIDED TO ADD A CHAPTER FOR THIS (probably also tacky!) because I hate end notes, lmao. :')

THIS 'FIC came about, originally, when I observed that all my 6996 'fic was from Chrome's PoV and decided to try one from Mukuro's PoV instead. In so doing (setting the stage for their meeting, that is), I touched (as background) on a few silly incidents I made up to decorate his childhood. I decided, in reviewing what I'd written at the time, that it was too passive, too summarizing, and needed more active story-telling. A friend I showed my writing to did agree with that. So, in the interests of writing something more active, I decided to slip those childhood antics into their own narrative. This began to grow into the desire to write a (semi-)coherent narrative for Mukuro's childhood, a topic which has endlessly fascinated me. Originally, I was still planning for this particular story to cover all the way up through his meeting with Chrome (the stuff with Tsuna, etc.), but as the length began to get out of hand, I decided to save that all that for later works and make this ONLY a story of beginnings.

++ Liberties I took with Mukuro's childhood/info on shit: 

\-- Yadda yadda, assuming he was in the wilds for a bit before being re-adopted into Lancia's Famiglia. Somewhere, I feel like I read that Mukuro was six (? though admittedly I don't know where this number came from) when he murdered the Estraneo. Lancia says That Incident (his own Famiglia's destruction) happened ~5 yrs ago in current canon, which would've made Mukuro apprx. 10 yrs old. I had him as being 10/11 (more like 11). My ages were all over the place, admittedly, and I skipped years in between chapters (sometimes, probably, without properly saying so). I tried to play on the side of safe, somewhat vague ages, but!!! UGH, NUMBERS, WHAT ARE THEY.  
\-- Situating it in Southern Italy, with Lancia having been born in Northern Italy and the base of operations being relocated there towards the story's end (which is where they were heading, of course). Obviously a pretty big liberty, but whatever.  
\-- The golden key Mukuro was gifted with for Christmas was intended to be a key to the Famiglia's stronghold in the north -- I don't think I ever actually said that in the narrative. Couldn't find a good place to insert it. FFTTT. ANYWAY, THAT'S WHAT THAT RANDOM PLOT DETAIL WAS.  
\-- Mukuro going to boarding school, reading random things, was sort of an excuse for me to insert bullshit English major things. PRETTY TRANSPARENT, YEAH? Anyway, I've given some thought to his intelligence level. I do think he can pilfer minds at a whim, so that's why I wrote him as being preternaturally smart. And considering he's been aligned with Verde in this latest arc, I have to think he has some ~~charisma~~ brainy bits. In terms of actual knowledge, though, I think he cheats, and so he doesn't always have functional/mature uses for what he learns (which, well, is how a lot of abnormally bright children are). I don't think Mukuro passably sounded like a kid in this story (? oops), except for a certain emotional stuntedness (that I think he actually does begin to move past, as an adult), but he is ~Mukuro~ and KHR is kinda bizarre. I GUESS I wanted to portray him as not having grown into himself, so to speak, butttttt. Creepy kid stuff.

\-- HUGE LIBERTY: Having it so that the Family which took Mukuro in was still keeping tabs on him as a sort of devil child (including what was to be done about him if he got out of hand), sending him to a school to monitor him -- M.M.'s (nearby) school also being for unusual kids -- all part of monitoring the these children on behalf of the mafia family, thus continuing the experiments, so to speak, which was what thus tipped Mukuro off the deep end ... but there's also the question of, would he have done it anyway, and he very well might have, since he kept saying so. I wanted it to be ambiguous. I'm probably spoiling it even now by saying this much. ANYWAY, I didn't want to make Mukuro look overly victimized, but I thought there might've been a little something extra that explained why he lost his shit as badly as he did (since, following all that, the character has obviously settled down a lot more, and it's hard to believe he's so volatile nowadays?). It still doesn't excuse his actions, obviously.

 **This fic owes a lot of inspiration to** nikoru's (@lj) Mukuro-childhood fics (which gave me the whole trident statue parallel/the idea for Bologna as the initial site of Estraneo's activities), and Lai's (picnicbird @ lj) Kokuyou/Lancia fics (though set later; still, mmmm delicious relationships), and Lysapadin's "Devotion," because even if Chrome didn't appear here yet, I was feeling the mighty tug of Kokuyorgy, and Ronsard's beautiful M.M./Chrome fic (also archived here) --

\-- which, I confess, is why I was sort of cagey about giving M.M. a concrete backstory when I wrote her. That one kept playing in my mind, for one thing, and for another, I suppose it was hard to think of any other Trauma that didn't seem somehow off or melodramatic. MUKURO'S IS EXAGGERATED ENOUGH. I MEAN, A LABORATORY, REALLY. But to that end, I actually intended her here to still be living with some theoretical family as a sort-of-rich kid/gentry descendant. Still, I think she has some Trauma. I'm just not really sure what it is. THANK YOU, AJ, FOR HOLDING MY HAND THROUGH THIS. :') And Kiwi and everyone else.


End file.
